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If, as Moore implies (although never states as fact), video games and violent movies are relatively harmless, it does not logically follow that all types of media presentation are harmless.
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Even the official quoted by Moore blames the welfare to work program, knowing full well that the drug issue is a red herring.
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Once again, your emphasis on the little boy as a thug confirms Moore's (and Busch's) assertion that people wanted to hang the child from the highest tree instead of looking at the real causes.
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That's because while there is a so-called war on drugs, there is no war on poverty.
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Poverty is frequently portrayed as natural, and the poor in America are seen by conservatives as VCR-owners who are just too lazy to work.
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In reality, what Moore describes here is the most vivid example of what can only be called wage slavery I have ever seen, to the detriment of families.
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It is notable that the Wall Street Journal's reaction to this segment of the film was even more dismissive than yours: It called Moore's claim "preposterous".
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, probably the most comprehensive among many rebuttals of the Oscar-winning documentary.
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How could he even think about blaming poverty and forced labor programs for anything bad that happens?
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8) Taliban and American aid.
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After the September 11 attacks, it was necessary for conservatives to somehow explain away the fact that the US government gave 245 million dollars to the new evildoers du jour.
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Never mind the fact that authors such as Robert Scheer warned of aiding the Taliban as early as in May 2001.
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Never mind that they did so not out of some humanitarian motivation, but because of the Taliban's violent enforcement of the ban on opium poppies.
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Never mind that in a regime that is controlled by warlords, it does not matter who is authorized to distribute the aid -- the ruling regional warlords will seize control of it and use it to their own advantage.
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Never mind that this very argument has been used by hawks in opposition to sending humanitarian aid to Iraq's Saddam Hussein.
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There is a huge difference, for example, between playing a game like "Quake" and listening to a radio broadcast that tells you that your family will be killed unless you take action to kill others now.
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Never mind that this is all documented on Michael Moore's website about the film.
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9) Gun homicides.
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His main mistake is that he does not use population corrected data, his second mistake is that he does not cite his sources (and, as you correctly point out, he probably uses different reporting methods for the different countries).
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A good comparison of international homicide rates can be found on the relatively neutral guncite.com website.
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Not surprisingly, guncite, too, compares data from different years -- as I know from personal experience, it is quite difficult to do comparisons of crime statistics due to differences in reporting frequency and methodology.
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The gun homicide rates for the countries Moore mentioned, according to guncite, are: Japan: 0.02 per 100,000 (1994)England/Wales: 0.11 per 100,000 (1997)Germany: 0.22 per 100,000 (1994)Australia: 0.44 per 100,000 (1994)United States: 3.72 per 100,000 (1999)
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Critics fail to credit Moore with not making the same mistake that some gun control advocates make -- concluding that gun ownership "leads" to violence.
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In fact, Moore mentions several counter-examples, and more such counter-examples can indeed be cited.
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It is intuitively obvious that guns do not actually cause violence -- but it is equally intuitively obvious that they make the violence that is committed more deadly.
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It is the second intuition which gun rights groups like the NRA seek to obscure using fraudulent data by the likes of John "Mary" Lott.
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The gun control movement, on the other hand, distracts from the real causes of violence -- poverty, paranoia, the "war on drugs" and antisexuality.
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If these causes were addressed, gun ownership in the United States would not be a problem (but also unnecessary); just like it is in Switzerland.
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10) Canada ammunition purchase.
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You write: Bowling shows Moore casually buying ammunition at an Ontario Walmart.
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He asks us to "look at what I, a foreign citizen, was able to do at a local Canadian Wal-Mart."
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"look at what I, a foreign citizen, was able to do at a local Canadian Wal-Mart."
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He buys several boxes of ammunition without a question being raised.
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Canadian officials have pointed out that the buy is faked or illegal.
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Once again, you fail to distinguish between regular film editing and "faking" (a word which "Canadian officials" have never used; for such a distortion, Moore would have been boiled alive by his critics).
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His claim that it is possible to purchase ammunition in supermarkets is independent from that claim.
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11) Heston's allegedly implied racism.
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If anything, it is his own failure that he did not clarify what he meant with "having a more mixed ethnicity".
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Heston's answers in the interview were evasive and unhelpful.
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While this can in part be explained with his age and mental condition, if he is unable to defend the interests of the NRA, he should not be their spokesman.
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In this case, Hanlon's Razor can be applied to Heston -- he is probably not racist, but incompetent.
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If Heston makes himself look like a fool, that should hardly be blamed on Michael Moore.
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Conclusion
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You write: "Bowling for Columbine is dishonest.
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"Bowling for Columbine is dishonest.
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It is fraudulent.
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To trash Heston, it even uses the audio/video editor to assemble a Heston speech that Heston did not give, and sequences images and carefully highlighted text to spin the viewer's mind to a wrong conclusion."
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None of this is true.
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What is true is that Bowling for Columbine is a diamond in the small world of big screen documentaries, one that shines brightly and illuminates an often misunderstood aspect of American culture.
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It is not a flawless diamond -- the "48 hours" scene in particular suffers from bad editing, the statistics are suboptimal, and Heston gets a bit more bashing than he deserves.
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Other than towards the NRA, the movie tries hard to avoid simplistic conclusions, and comes up with some thoughtful answers.
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Obviously, media propaganda can incite people to kill.
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The most shameful part of the ongoing attacks against Moore is that these answers have been all but ignored by his critics.
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Had Moore wanted to make a propaganda film, he would have used other material: photos from America's Emergency Rooms.
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Certainly, Moore is one of the most talented filmmakers in the United States today, and his film fully deserved its Oscar.
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The shrill (and remarkably unsuccessful) Internet campaign to "revoke" his award seems to be motivated more by jealousy than by real concerns about the film's accuracy.
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Interactive fiction like video games, on the other hand, presents violence in a narrative context, which may very well desensitize participants to said violence, but no causative link has ever been proven.
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It is not only the highest grossing non-music documentary of all time, among the users of the largest Internet film database, IMDB, it is also the highest rated one.
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According to the LA Times, the documentary genre "owes a huge debt to Michael Moore" -- after Bowling's success, films like "Spellbound" and "Capturing the Friedmans" were taken seriously and shown in many more theatres than otherwise likely.
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But perhaps the campaign against Moore is really motivated by another reason.
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It is unlikely, however, that the unfair attacks against him will have much of an impact.
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Moore's hypothesis (which apparently comes at least in part from the book "Culture of Fear" by Barry Glassner, also advertised on Moore's website) is that the constant bombardment with messages of fear can incite paranoia, which itself can lead to violent acts.
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Critics have now gone so far as to call for the revocation of the award.
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This is consistent with the kind of media-incited violence described above, and in no relationship whatsoever to the theory of video game or music incited violence.
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It is no surprise, however, that US (and European) media do not question their own propaganda of fear.
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Moore's second hypothesis is that America's foreign policy may contribute to the belief that violence is an appropriate means to solve conflicts, a hypothesis which is shared by many sociologists and psychologists.
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Children who grow up in war-torn regions are known for having similar views -- war is perceived as a normal part of existence, violence as a natural way to solve disputes.
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Their chances are small, however, as their arguments rely on polemic, exaggeration and misrepresentation -- in other words, on the same techniques which they accuse Moore of using.
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In a weaker sense, the same message is projected to American children, who grow up being told that it is not acceptable to be violent to one another, but who simultaneously have to endure corporal punishment and media messages about how "the enemies of freedom" are punished.
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Moore's film was made before the dead bodies of Qusay and Uday Hussein were paraded on national TV.
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Americans were gloating over this demented corpse show:
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"They squealed like little piggies too, so you'll have to make do with 'oink, oink, squeeeeeeeallll' for their last words.
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'oink, oink, squeeeeeeeallll'
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That goes for your grandson Mustafa too, by the way.
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Still think fucking with the U.S. was a good idea, Sammy?"
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Mustafa was 14 years when he was killed.
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Americans cheer the killing of children, yet wonder why their own children grow up to be more violent than those in other nations.
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It is paradoxical notions like this one which Moore's film seeks to address.
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Inaccuracies
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Your webpage list a number of alleged inaccuracies in Moore's movies.
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It is true that Moore's film is sometimes unintentionally deceptive, but to call it fraudulent is hyperbole to the extreme.
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Let's look at some specific criticisms:
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1) The bank scene, listed on your website on a separate page.
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Critics have stated that this scene was "staged", but in the bank interview, the official tells Moore that the bank has its own vault storing about 500 weapons at any given time.
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It is also a licensed firearms dealer which can perform its own background checks.
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Dear David Hardy,
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It is not explained what "normally" is supposed to mean, but that claim flatly contradicts the statement of the bank official in the film.
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This sounds more like a later correction for public relations purposes, but of course nobody questions the bank claims when they can be used against Moore.
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It is fascinating to watch the organized character assassination of Michael Moore that has been going on in the United States since the release of his last documentary.
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The only thing that Moore compressed is the timeframe.
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According to the same WSJ interview, "Typically, you're looking at a week to 10 days waiting period."
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"Typically, you're looking at a week to 10 days waiting period."
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This is plausible -- but entirely irrelevant for the movie, which already makes it quite clear that a background check is being performed.
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Moore's detractors have sometimes extended those 7-10 days to several weeks, contradicting the bank's own estimate.
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The bank does exactly what it advertises: It hands out guns from its vault to those who open an account.
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The silly criticisms of the scene obscure the real obscenity of the situation: a bank handing out guns to its customers, higlighting the utter laxness of how Americans deal with deadly weapons and a love of firearms that borders on the religious.
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2) The Lockheed-Martin interview.
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The dialogue goes as follows:
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A defense of Michael Moore and "Bowling for Columbine"
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"So you don't think our kids say to themselves, gee, dad goes off to the factory every day - he builds missiles.
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