Roeper isn't the only journalist edging over the thin yellow line between politics and prose. Francine Prose says when she reviewed the Clinton memoir for Newsday, she knew that "... regardless of the literary merits of the book, the human being that was going to appear from those pages would be superior to the people in the current administration." According the Jack Shafer's Slate article about the Clinton reviews, Prose's "main motivation" was writing about politics. The Shafer article is fascinating for two reasons. It takes another step in making the process of journalism - or, I suppose, media-making - more transparent. "I read the early chapters on Clinton's childhood, high school, and Oxford experiences," Washington Post Op-Ed writer Anne Applebaum told Shafer, "skipped the Arkansas governorship, and went on to the presidency. Then I got stuck." New York Observer reviewer Robert Sam Anson reportedly "prepped himself for the review…
Richard Roeper has an article in the Sun-Times that draws the right lines about F911 and what Moore is and isn't:Yes, "Fahrenheit 9/11" omits some facts and details that would add balance, and the truth sometimes gets stretched and bent to Moore's convenience. ... Michael Moore is a skilled editorialist and performance artist who advances his viewpoints though manipulation of news footage, music, cartoons and his own considerable, Woody Allen-esque comedic skills. Link-generatrix Torri Oats sent me that one too. Sign of the times, I guess, when movie critics dive this deep into politics. In NYT, Nick Kristof's alarm about partisan brawling spilling out of the clubhouse into the moviehouse is the only reasonable commentary I've seen on that issue. I still think it's a good thing that Moore is bringing the fight up to the ramparts of pop culture, where the action seems to be, but Kristof is a…
What is the deal with the violent responses to Fahrenheit 9/11? Is it any surprise to David Brooks or Chris Hitchens that Michael Moore is an attention-grabber, an occasional panderer and a showman not a journalist? When you attack Michael Moore for being a weak intellectual or a fact-manipulator, you miss the point and you sound awfully defensive besides. It's particularly dismaying to me to see the scathing sarcasm in Brooks's Saturday column in The Times and in Hitchens's recent Slate piece. Both attacks on Moore reveal the writers' own elitism. Here's Hitchens:From Fahrenheit 9/11 you can glean even more astounding and hidden disclosures, such as the capitalist nature of American society, the existence of Eisenhower's "military-industrial complex," and the use of "spin" in the presentation of our politicians. It's high time someone had the nerve to point this out. There's more. Poor people often volunteer to join the army,…
I caught a CNN piece this week about terrorist web sites. Citing research by Dartmouth College, the AP and Gabriel Weimann of the U.S. Institute of Peace in DC, the piece presents an instructive list of the key uses to which terror groups are putting the Web. What struck me was that it was a more streamlined, lucid presentation of the elements of Internet advocacy than you'd ever get in big media coverage of domestic, issue-driven web-work, perhaps even of politics. I suppose fear clarifies one's thinking and accelerates one's learning curve. Check this out:How terrorists use Internet Separate research conducted by Weimann, Dartmouth College and The Associated Press found terrorists to be using the Internet in several ways: * Propaganda. Terrorists make demands, try to elicit sympathy, attempt to instill fear and chaos and to explain themselves. The Web lets them offer up gruesome video images that broadcasters would…
The other day I rented "The Siege", the 1998 movie about an Islamic terrorist cell that attacks New York City. The things they got right are as striking as the things they got terribly and naively wrong. For all it's sympathy and attempted accuracy about Muslims, the movie still portrays the terrorists as religious fanatics. They really do "hate our way of life." The filmmakers are the same crew that made "Glory" (also starring Denzel Washington), so there's no shortage of American accountability for the evils that befall America, but the movie misses the mark when it comes to the venomous hatred for the U.S. that we've now all seen on the streets of Iraq. It's conveniently colonial to think of the terrorists as misguided fundamentalists. What if they just hate our country? Not for its culture, but for its actions, for its politics. Too scary for Hollywood pre-9/11. Too…