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With the success of "Roger and Me" also came a critical rap: That he took liberties with the truth, fiddling with the chronology, for greater dramatic effect. But that criticism doesn't seem to have made an impression on Moore, and that's nowhere more apparent than in "Stupid White Men." In it, readers are told that 10 million people left the welfare rolls during the '90s, brutally kicked off by Bill Clinton. He writes that five-sixths of the defense budget in 2001 went toward building a single type of plane and that the recent recession is nothing more than a fabrication by the wealthy to keep down the working classes. And readers who uncritically accept those "facts" -- along with a number of other egregious and sloppy distortions -- will be duped. Good satire also should be grounded in fact. Regrettably, Moore gets his facts wrong again and again and again, and a simple check of the sources he cites shows that lazy research is often to blame. Consider, for instance, his claim that "two-thirds of came from just over seven hundred individuals." Given the $2,000 federal limit on individual donations, this claim is obviously false. To back it up, he cites the Center for Responsive Politics Web site (opensecrets.org) and an August 2000 article from the New York Times. As opensecrets.org clearly indicates, however, only 52.6 percent of Bush's total $193 million in campaign funds came from individuals. The Times article Moore references actually states that 739 people gave two-thirds of the soft money raised by the Republican Party (which uses its money for "party-building" activities that support all GOP candidates, not just Bush) in the 2000 election cycle as of June of that year. Whether out of malice or laziness, Moore conflates the party's soft money with Bush's campaign funds.
This pattern -- the very sources Moore cites proving him wrong -- continues throughout the book.
In a discussion of Pentagon spending, he refers to the "$250 billion the Pentagon plans to spend in 2001 to build 2800 new Joint Strike Fighter planes" and states that "the proposed increase in monies for the Pentagon over the next four years is $1.6 trillion." To back this up, he refers to the Web site of the peace activist group Council for a Livable World. CLW's own analysis of the 2001 budget, however, shows that $250 billion is the total multiyear cost of the Joint Strike Fighter program, not the amount spent in one year. $1.6 trillion, meanwhile, was the total amount of money requested by the Pentagon at the time for 2001-2005. It covers five years, not four, and is a total budget request, not a "proposed increase" over previously requested budget levels. It shouldn't even take this much research, however, to determine that out of the total defense budget request of $305.4 billion in 2001, $250 billion was never intended to go toward one type of plane, nor that an increase of $400 billion per year in military spending was never proposed.
http://www.spinsanity.org/columns/20020403.html
Moore's myriad mistakes
By Bryan Keefer
October 16, 2003
Michael Moore makes at least 17 factual errors or misrepresentations in his latest book, Dude, Where's My Country?, ranging from stating disputed information as fact to repeating a media myth to twisting his own sources. As a companion to our article about Moore's mistakes in Dude and his history of such distortions, here is a list of all the errors that we found in the book:
Page xiii: Moore claims that News Corp, the parent of HarperCollins, which published Stupid White Men, "dumped in some bookstores with no advertising, no reviews, and the offer of a three-city tour: Arlington! Denver! Somewhere in Jersey! In other words, the book was sent to the gallows for a quick and painless death." Yet in a February 5, 2002 letter on his web site, Moore stated that "HarperCollins is doing their best to get the book out there - but now, even they have run into resistance, with some bookstores telling them that they are not interested in having me come to their stores on the book tour" because of the controversial nature of the book. Later in the letter, he added that "I'll be hitting a couple dozen cities on the book tour, and I'll probably add a few more (if you'd like me to come to your town, let me or HarperCollins know!)." And directly contradicting his assertion in Dude, Moore wrote in a February 13 letter that his tour "initially included only three cities: New York, L.A., and Denver." Clearly, he is spinning the publicity campaign for his own book.
Page 9: Moore, writing about the connections between the Carlyle Group (a private investment firm with a politically powerful board of directors including George H. W. Bush Sr.) and the Bin Ladens, states that "After September 11, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal both ran stories pointing out this strange coincidence. Your first response, Bush, was to ignore it, hoping, I guess, that the story would go away. Your father and his buddies at Carlyle did not renounce the Bin Laden investment. Your army of pundits went into spin control... And then the video footage came out. It showed a number of the 'good' Bin Ladens - including Osama's mother, a sister and two brothers - with Osama at his son's wedding." Moore is distorting the timeline of when that information came out: He cites Al Jazeera (no date) and two articles published before September 11, 2001 (the articles date from Feb. 28, 2001 and March 1, 2001), not after.
Pages 15 and 16: Moore asserts that Osama Bin Laden requires dialysis for a kidney condition. Moore continues by asking "how could have really pulled this off while his skin was turning green?" In fact, as one of Moore's own sources (a January 19, 2002 New York Times article) notes, the nature and severity of Bin Laden's health problems is in dispute. The Times quotes an unnamed official who says that "While there have been a lot of rumors about the status of his health, we do not have evidence to support that he has had kidney failure or is on dialysis." Yet another of Moore's sources, an Associated Press article of March 25, 2000, notes that in spite of questions about his health, "it has been business as usual for Bin Laden," and cites an unnammed Western intelligence official stating that "He is still operating an enormous terrorist network around the world."
http://www.spinsanity.org/columns/20031016b.html
I took both of these books and read them and then compared what was written to the contradictory information and source provided to point out his mistakes, and I found it fairly credible and pretty convincing. In fact, its not really debated by most people that Moore plays kidn of fast and loose with his fact finding, because he feels so passionately about the "broader points" and I agree with him on the broader points.
Then this from the guardian:
Arguably worse, Moore has been accused of serious inaccuracies of fact, which you can find detailed on a liberal website called Spinsanity. I won't go into them here but I was interested in Moore's response when he was tackled on CNN not so long ago about these errors. The presenter Lou Dobbs asked him about the accusations. Part of the transcript goes like this:
Moore: I think they found some guy named Dan was named Dave, and there was another thing. But you know, look, this is a book of political humour. So, I mean, I don't respond to that sort of stuff, you know.
Dobbs: Glaring inaccuracies?
Moore: No, I don't. Why should I? How can there be inaccuracy in comedy? You know.
Dobbs: That does give one licence. I think you may have given all of us a loophole.
Moore: When Jonathan Swift said that what the Irish do is eat their young - in other words, that's what the British were proposing during the famine - I think that, you know, you have to understand satire.
You certainly do.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Columnists/Column/0,5673,1088297,00.html
I don't feel the need to go on. His history of inaccuracies is not in real serous dispute. The only question is does it rise to the level of undermining his overall value, and I'm not sure that it does or doesn't. When I want his new movie though, I'm going to remember to keep my brain on and question everything I hear, not just be a passive cheerleader fawning over somone who says the kinds of things I want to hear.
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