Students Fact-Check Mikey
Michael Moore recently paid a visit to Northwestern University. Their student newspaper was there keeping an eye on things. Here’s their report. It’s not often you see college students willing to go after anything Moore says, so these two are to be commended.
Michael Moore: The fact-check
Posted 10-16-2003, 14:07
by James Gelfand and Robert VerBruggen
The Northwestern Chronicle
MOORE: Bush lied about Saddam helping to plan September 11, and he’s admitted he lied.
REALITY: Bush neither lied nor admitted to lying about Saddam and September 11. The president made statements linking Hussein to the Al-Queda network, but never explicitly to the World Trade Center attack. Therefore, his statement that there was no evidence linking Hussein to the events of September 11 was not an admission of a lie.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/3118262.stm
MOORE: Most Americans are pro-choice.
REALITY: This is a half truth; most Americans believe in abortion under some conditions, but most in fact oppose abortions solely to terminate unwanted pregnancies. Saying that most Americans are “pro-choice,” then, is at least misleading.
http://abcnews.go.com/sections/us/DailyNews/abortion_poll030122.html
MOORE: Bush asked Wesley Clark to link Saddam to the September 11 attacks.
REALITY: Though Clark certainly did imply this on “Meet the Press,” he soon thereafter recanted to Sean Hannity on “Hannity and Colmes.” A recent Spinsanity article, including a transcription of the original statement, argues that Clark did not explicitly say it was Bush who asked him to lie. Either way, though Moore’s statement was false: the White House did not ask Wesley Clark to link Saddam to the attacks.
http://www.spinsanity.org/columns/20030903.html
MOORE: When asked by a student what he thought about a case on the new Supreme Court document about forcing children to say the pledge, Moore responded “I think it’s terrible.”
REALITY: It was the student’s question, not Moore’s speech, but such a case does not exist; the matter was settled in 1943 with West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette. The issue now facing the Court is whether the words “Under God” violate the First Amendment.
http://supreme.lp.findlaw.com/constitution/amendment01/11.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A23699-2003Oct14.html
MOORE: Rush Limbaugh has been around for 20 years.
REALITY: This year marked his show’s 15th anniversary.
MOORE: “The majority of Americans realize they were not told the truth about the war.”
REALITY: No one can read the minds of every American, but his approval ratings do not bear this out. According to an Oct. 10 Gallup poll, only 43 percent of Americans said the president “deliberately misled the American public about how big a threat Iraq was to the United States,” and 54 did not. An October Newsweek poll showed similar results, with 45 percent – not a majority – saying Bush “Purposely misled the public about evidence that Iraq had banned weapons in order to build support for war.” Also, as of September 10, 2003, 51 percent approved of the way Bush was handling Iraq. Fifty-two percent approved of the way he was handling his job as president.
http://www.usatoday.com/news/polls/tables/live/2003-09-11-poll-results.htm
MOORE: Moore was obviously sarcastic at this point, but he repeatedly suggested that artificially inflating wages and redistributing income is good for the economy.
REALITY: It’s not.
Find a friend with an economics textbook, and look up the explanation of how minimum wage hurts the poor. A summary, designed specifically in response to Moore, can be found at www.moorewatch.com.
Bowling for Columbine errors:
Recently, Moore responded to some of the right-wing “Whacko Attackos” on his Web site. His own sourcing, however, often disproves him.
He posted the entire text of a Heston speech, alongside the clips that ran in the film. With a multi-window browser, however, one can run both at once and follow along. It’s obvious how Moore edited the speech to skip conciliatory remarks and make the remaining ones sound harsh.
He admits to a flaw in his altering of an anti-Dukakis commercial—without admitting that he edited the commercial. In the film, his editing appears to be an original part of the advertisement.
He stands by the assertion that the Lockheed-Martin plant near Columbine makes “weapons of mass destruction,” and provides an interview with an employee to prove it. The clip, however, shows that they currently make rockets...that carry satellites...which in turn can guide missiles. They have not made a nuclear weapon since the mid-1960s and only partially assembled Peacekeeper MX missiles in the mid-1980s.
http://www.michaelmoore.com/words/wackoattacko/
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