“Michael Moore is bad for your health”
Why we posted this: It’s a useful account of the dangers of propaganda documentaries
The original story:
Healthcare as horror movie
By Christopher Caldwell
The Financial Times
6 July, 2007
The story in brief:
A distinguished journalist notes that Moore’s movie Sicko tends to make its audience less wise.
In his regular Saturday column in the Financial Times (6/7 July, 2007) Christopher Caldwell of The Weekly Standard discussed Michael Moore’s new film, Sicko. He pointed out a conundrum which affects many discussions of public services. People often say they are unsatisfied with the service in general, but as it applies to them are pretty content. In other words, they think public services fail other people, but not them.
It seems then that people are influenced by what they hear from third parties such as the media (and in a depressing direction) but when reporting their own actual experience, they think it’s been pretty good. In short, they can become victims of propaganda, and let it over-rule their own experience.
Caldwell’s review of the Moore movies admits that the film-maker has some good points to make. “But it is difficult to isolate these gems amid the omissions, inconsistencies and preaching.”
Caldwell has one very important paragraph. Here it is:
What makes propaganda is never the argument so much as the spirit in which it is presented. It is not the US healthcare problem that is Mr Moore’s enemy, it is the complexity of it. He rejects subtleties. His goal is not to break through to those who do not agree with him but to drown out the doubts of those who do. Those who sit down to watch Sicko without a broad knowledge of the US healthcare system will leave the theatre with a shallower understanding of the crisis than the one they arrived with.
livingissues comment:
Michael Moore’s documentaries are often celebrated as being intelligent and funny, even if they overstae their case. They are said to appeal to people who might not otherwise take an interest in these topics. It becomes important to realise that a proportion of Michael Moore’s audience may think that once they have taken in the Moore view – they’ve understood the issue and don’t have to think any more.
The difficulty is that Moore’s view is very thin and very skewed.
livingissues’ editor, Richard D North (as well as writing this note), wrote about Sicko and Manufacturing Dissent (a movie critique on Moore’s work) at the Social Affairs Unit’s “webreview” of the arts.
