June 30, 2004
Fahrenheit 9/11 and the Embedded Mainstream Media
by H. L. Rucks
Michael Moore’s documentary, Fahrenheit 9/11 has turned the heat up under the Bush Administration in a way that our mainstream media, over the course of more that three years of nearly continuous scandal and bad government have not. When the movie got glowing reviews from such establishment voices as Ebert and Roper and set attendance records for a documentary in its opening weekend, it stirred up a hornet nest of criticism from the right. In its blunt frontal attack on the Bush presidency, it has the kind of moral clarity usually associated with the other end of the political spectrum, and it speaks with a candor that’s been absent from broadcast media going back to the days of the Clinton Inquisition. Faced with such an unrelenting, unabashed and coherent narrative, conservative pundits have scrambled to find an effective response. It came as no surprise to observers of conservative political tactics when a guest on a recent cable news spot blasted Moore’s credentials as a blue collar populist. After all, he pointed out, Moore doesn’t live in Flint anymore. He lives in the posh Central Park West community of Manhattan and sends his daughter to an elite school. Sound familiar? The key word here is elite. That’s right. Underneath the baseball cap and scraggly beard and Walmart clothes, there beats in Michael Moore the heart of an aristocratic snob. Who’da thought it?
This is nothing new from the right. As Thomas Frank points out in his recent book What’s Wrong With Kansas, movement conservatives attack the authenticity of all liberals and progressives as a matter of course. They are all effete elitists totally disconnected from real hard-working Americans. Only conservative Republicans have authenticity. They are the true and faithful champions of the Common Man. It matters not that they tirelessly defend corporate greed and laissez-faire economics that oppress and disenfranchise him. It matters not that Rush Limbaugh smokes Cuban cigars, crooks his pinky while emptying glasses of thousand-dollar-a-bottle French wine, and loves to tour the gourmet restaurants of Paris—he’s an arch-conservative and authentic by definition . In the meantime neo-cons, ruthlessly beat down any voice-- Michael Moore being the case in point-- who emerges to defend populist values. The anger of peasant-consumers is permissible as long as it never targets the plutocratic forces that actually shape our lives-- hence the danger of Michael Moore and the imperative to bannish him to the hated class of elite liberal snobs.
It is no coincidince that Fox News already had a web link dedicated to destroying Moore way back in March before Fahrenheit even appeared. That was in response to the success of his earlier films Bowling for Columbine and Roger and Me and his recent best-selling book Stupid White Men. In the particular “fair and balanced” article in question, written by Australian journalist, Tim Blair (whose mini-bio accompanying the article proudly styled as an anti-evironmentalist rebel “who has owned dozens of cars and motorcycles-- none of them electric”), we learn that Michael Moore works for the very corporations he pretends to loath. (Don’t we all.) Mike lambastes Nike for its sweat-shop outsourcing while wearing sneakers made by a non-Nike purveyor that buys from the same sources. He flies around on corporate jets furnished by his publishers and film distributors. He is a heavy guy who breathes through his mouth. Mike isn’t at all funny himself and thinks Barney the Dinosaur is. Worst of all Mike is a filthy multi-millionaire who both denies his wealth and brags about having lots of money. This hypocrisy nullifies any authenticity he might gain for being a self-made multi-millionaire. Authentic self-made multi-millionaires don’t challenge conservative orthodoxy, and they never affect empathy with the down-trodden poor. If you work for corporations, wear sweat-shop tennies, fly on private jets and make multi-millions, you have to love your status and money with utter sincerity -- else you’re a vile elitist fraud.
This is precisely the view of Michael Moore the right-wing would like to promote in hopes of discouraging likely voters from seeing Fahrenheit 9/11 for themselves. Failing that, they must strive to inoculate those same voters against its message. To wit: the Bush administration is corrupt, immoral, and anti-democratic. To say such things is, of course, jolting. We have grown used to living since 9/11 in an atmosphere of deluded unanimity. Criticism of the administration, particularly of the Patriot Act and the war in Iraq, has been characterized as partisan sniping, or even worse, as treason. The Patriot Act, as its name proclaims, was wrapped in an American flag and shoved down our throats with hardly a whimper of opposition. Opposition simply wasn’t deemed viable by the Democratic leadership in the aftermath of the WTC and Pentagon attacks.
If 9/11 complicated the lives of millions of Americans, for the press, it vastly simplified life. Instead of having to bear the burden of resisting the jingoistic yellow press, they could lie down and snuggle up to the status quo in the name of national unity. After all, the Democratic opposition was standing out on the steps of Congress holding hands with the Republican majority and crooning “God Bless America”. The opposition was assuming a servile posture of nonopposing. After the President addressed the nation on September 20, 2001, Democrats refused the invitation from the networks even to comment. As Dick Gephardt put it, they wanted America “to speak with one voice”. That it certainly did. In such an environment, the press could hardly be faulted for embedding itself in the comfortable folds of the new flag-draped political landscape of Washington. It was now time for the watchdogs of democracy to train their vigilance abroad—while looking the other way as Republicans used the War on Terror to consolidate their nearly complete monopoly of power in our national capitol. The Democrats were awakened from this swoon of idiotic complaisance by the 2002 mid-term elections in which they lost their last foothold of national governance-- control of the Senate. The press, however, never woke up from their comfortable dream that the country was in good hands. Unquestionably good hands. And, of course, there was absolutely no incentive for them to bite the hands that fed them.
All of which brings us back to our cap-and-non-Nike-tennis-shoe-wearing hero, Michael Moore. The shock of Fahrenheit 9/11 for many of us was not simply in the story it told of Bush’s shady connections, his mendacity about the rationales for war, or any of a long list of high crimes and misdemeanors his administration perpetrated on the country. The shock came from seeing George W. Bush and his presidency for the first time without looking through the rose-colored lenses of the embedded media. As much as Fahrenheit 9/11 is an indictment of the Bush Administration, it is also, both explicitly and implicitly, an indictment of a self-serving and complicit conglomerate media that has aided and abetted it. By their self-censorship in meticulously ignoring or glossing over one abuse of power after another, by their false tone of normalcy and equanimity, by their failure to ask hard questions, by their endless repetitions of administration talking points, they have served as mouthpieces for the Republican agenda. They have reserved all moral indignation for arch-villains like Osama Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. They studiously investigate every detail and nuance of the daily developments in the Scott Peterson, Kobe Bryant, and Michael Jackson trials, or they spend a whole week marveling at the wit of the mischievous Presidential Son in making an unannounced Thanksgiving visit to the troops in Iraq without telling the First Mom and Dad. There are reams and reams of analysis and commentary about Janet Jackson’s wardrobe malfunction and Smarty Jones’ chances for a Triple Crown, but they cannot remember from day to day about the President’s stonewalling of the 9/11 investigations, about the administration’s close ties to Enron at a time when they were picking the pockets of the entire populations of western states. They could not remember what the administration said about Saddam’s nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons at the beginning of Bush’s term and compare it to what they began saying a year later. When an unidentified administration source illegally leaked the identity of CIA operative Valerie Plame the administration said they would immediately begin investigating themselves. Not an eyebrow was raised in Pundit Land. When the administration told Congress its prescription drug bill would cost $395 billion, chief Medicare actuary, Richard Frost, testified to Congress he was placed under a gag order not to reveal his estimate of $500 to $600 billion to lawmakers. The administration similarly and routinely low-balled budget-deficit figures and the costs of invading Iraq. It overestimated job creation quarter after quarter, but the mainstream media never drew any conclusions from any of this about the credibility of George Bush or his government. This was the same broadcast establishment that had eagerly and erroneously branded Al Gore a hopeless mythomaniac back in the 2000 presidential campaign by distorting comments he made concerning an insignificant number of utterly trivial matters. When the Bush Administration began a campaign of deceit and exaggeration over life and death questions of war and peace and began bankrupting the nation with unwise tax cuts, the media developed a debility of recall that manifested itself in an almost surreal incoherence of events. Voices of reason and doubt surfaced briefly and vanished again, borne away on a flood of hyper-patriotism . The tenuous thread of journalistic scepticism emerged weakly from time to time, but was allowed to expire with the next news cycle. In the meantime the Bush Administration kept up its partisan drumbeat of war and supply-side economics and the media amplified it across the land.
Into this environment came Fahrenheit 9/11 with its straightforward narration of events. For once we were allowed to view our recent history all collected in one place, all at one time, in chronological order and without media piety. Michael Moore told us a story-- one we had only heard before in paraphrased fragments. Some critics of the movie have dwelt weakly on Fahrenheit’s one-sidedness, its violent disregard for academic context and the rules of public debate: It doesn’t tell the other side of the story. It’s malicious. It’s not fair and balanced. It lowers the tone of our lofty national discourse. Bla, bla, bla. One reviewer on CNN, a self-styled Democrat who hated the movie, described it as a “two-by-four”, a ruthless and partisan flic. Nobody would disagree with that. But what nobody is saying is that the other side of the story has been told us over and over again-- has in fact been drilled into our skulls. The media have participated in a mass marketing of George Bush by providing the administration with a continuous and uncritical outlet for its views, cost free. Who can remember an interview with an administration source that cast the least doubt on that source’s veracity? Yet no divergent view has been allowed on the air without being bracketed by administration attacks on its substance and author. The vicious character assassination machine of the administration has in turn targeted Paul O’Neil, Joe Wilson, Richard Clarke, David Kay, and Richard Foster, one after another, and the mainstream media have been its willing instrument. No attempt was ever made to investigate, validate, or refute allegations or to hold the administration responsible for its attacks. The media remains ostensibly above the fray—which means above finding facts, above casting doubt, and above drawing conclusions. In other words, they have remained above reporting. In telling the other side of the story, Michael Moore weighs into a war of words that pits millions of television screens against a lone man with a camera crew and an ice cream truck.
The fact that this administration has been able to engage in so many campaigns of misinformation, obfuscation, and yes, outright lying, while the President’s credibility with large blocks of the American people remains intact is a testament either to the utter incompetence of media coverage or to its corruption. As an article in London’s The Guardian on Sept., 1, 2003 put it:
“When . . . a large proportion of Americans are reputed to believe that Saddam Hussein was implicated in al-Qaeda terrorism, a belief for which there is not a shred of credible evidence, one wonders if the world's largest democracy is being well served by its media.”
Humorist Bill Maher, formerly of the popular Politically Incorrect show recently suppressed by ABC for-- you guessed it-- political incorrectness, made the following observation on the Tavis Smiley Show: "The true axis of evil in America is the genius of our marketing combined with the stupidity of our people." I appreciate Maher’s point, but would be kinder to the American people by amending his formulation thus: The true axis of evil in America is the genius of conservatiive political marketing combined with the cowardice of the press. America is currently being divided into two groups of people: those who are willing to go out and get much of their news from alternative sources such as the internet, books, and magazines, and those who are not. In the same way, we will be divided into two similar groups by Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11—into those who go out and see the movie and those who don’t.
Detractors will find Fahrenheit a difficult target. While it’s easy to twist words and eviscerate arguments, it’s more difficult to refute images. You can only ask viewers to disbelieve their eyes, and in this case the images have an iron-clad authenticity— they leap at us out of the archives of our own video memories. Lethal as Moore can be, the real power of his film doesn’t derive from what he says--it comes from the subjects of the film themselves, the well-known faces of the Bush Administration, telling their own stories, spinning their own webs and—er, well, lying through their teeth on a pretty much regular basis. Out there in the real world without an army of apologists to mitigate their views, they look positively naked. Watching Fahrenheit is like channel-hopping through time. We recognize a history we have recently lived but have somehow forgotten or misplaced in the fog of post 9/11 madness. It is, however, undeniably our history and exists solidly beyond the manipulations of a mere propagandist, even one as talented as Michael Moore. The right wing will undoubtedly parse Moore’s narrative and every statement in the film down to the last phoneme, but the most damning utterances in Fahrenheit are not to be found in anything commentators say. The film’s tirade against the Bush White House is delivered by the administration itself, in its own familiar rhetoric. Say what you will about Moore’s biased commentary, these speeches, sound bites, interviews and photo ops are events Bush and company inflict upon themselves. These after all are their words, their policies, their visions for our world and our times. Even Bill Clinton at his most self-revealing has never bared his soul in public more appallingly than young oil executive George W. Bush as he quips in the film, "Access is power, and uh, I can find my dad and talk to him any time.” Or when he addresses a convocation of fat cats and jokes that most people consider them “the haves and have mores. I just call them my base.”
If such inadvertent self-immolation on Bush’s part were not enough, Moore’s bluntest and most devastating points are made, particularly in the second half of the film, by ordinary Americans. We witness a virtual Main Street parade of them: gray-haired grandmothers, grieving loved ones, gung-ho Marine recruiters, troops in Iraq, state troopers in Oregon, amputees in veteran’s hospitals, unwitting corporate war profiteers caught in the relentless objectivity of the camera. Not to mention the shocked, awed, maimed and inconsolable civilians of Iraq. Moore gives us all of this in a documentary work that manages to take audiences from hilarity to heartbreak and back again, repeatedly. It is not Michael Moore’s narrative that makes the film an inevitable tear-jerker, but the immediacy of re-experiencing our own history, unadulterated and unobscured by the smoke and mirrors of complicit media.
In coming months we can expect Republicans to wage a vitriolic and decidedly unhumanitarian war against Fahrenheit 9/11 and against Moore personally. It will most likely be waged on two fronts. The first will concentrate on attempts to discredit film and director by niggling over trivial details of text and tone and Moore’s elitist personality. The second will consist of attempts to keep as many people as possible from seeing it (which in a way is a vindication of its message). This strategy has already emerged. The Associated Press reported this week that R.L. Fridley, owner of Des Moines-based Fridley Theatres in Iowa and Kansas has said his theaters will not be showing Fahrenheit 9/11. He purports to believe the film will embolden terrorists. Actually it stands a much greater chance of emboldening voters, which the Bush Administration fears much more than terrorists. Such thinly disguised censorship may be the best hope for the Bush camp. After all is said and done, after all the strings are pulled by Bush’s posse of leakers and personal assassination squads, and after the corporate media mill grinds the great stone of this movie down to a tiny pebble, seeing is still believing. There is a preponderance of evidence in this film that not all the kings horses and all the king’s men, not all the talking heads in the land will convince us is false. We will believe our own eyes and ears, and Moore deserves our gratitude for helping us to reopen them.
Copyright 2004, Noble Savage Review. All rights reserved
