My latest column is up at The American Prospect, and it's an examination of the media's peculiar obsession with Michael Moore's factual accuracy. A taste:
As a certified health care wonk who loves nothing more than posting comparative spending graphs, I'm all for rapidly increasing the complexity and accuracy with which these issues are debated. But the media rarely indulges such passions. Apparently Michael Moore has a peculiar effect on them.
To wit, Moore is a documentary filmmaker. Fred Thompson is a likely Republican candidate for president. Thompson recently released a radio commentary on the Moore's movie that mixed outright falsehoods with deceptive omissions. There was no media outcry, no Wolf Blitzer follow-up, no CNN truth squad. Nothing. Silence.
Or forget Thompson. Recently, the entire field of announced Republican candidates debated, live on national television. Mitt Romney, one of the frontrunners, took the opportunity to claim that Saddam Hussein never let the inspectors into Iraq, and if he had, we would've gone to war. This is untrue. The media did not collapse into paroxysms over the inaccuracy. Indeed, they hardly seemed to notice it.
So what accounts for their peculiar obsession with the truth of Moore's films? It's not that these media outlets relentlessly examine the veracity of other public figures, or that Moore is somehow greater in stature than leading presidential candidates...
