For the past week or so we here at MOOREWATCH have been on top of a story on how Michael Moore completely faked a newspaper headline declaring that Al Gore won the 2000 election. (See here, here, and here for the whole story.) Well, an interpid reader named Stuart Hayashi, who first brought the story to our attention, managed to get ahold of a librarian who had access to the microfiche archives of the Bloomington Pantagraph. Despite being a self-professed Moore fan, she agreed to fax me a copy of the disputed page.
Now, just so we’re all clear about what we’re dealing with, here we see a screen capture of the alleged Pantagraph “headline” as shown by Moore in F9/11.
The letter to the editor is highlighted above in yellow. (Click on the image for a larger version.) Now, in the interests of full disclosure, the image above was faxed to me on three pages. I took the three pages and assembled them in Photoshop. Apart from this assembly, and the color-correction of the text, I have not altered or changed the image in any way.
Let’s recap. On December 5, 2001, a letter to the editor entitled “Latest Florida recount shows Gore won election” was published in the Bloomington, IL Pantagraph. Then, almost three years later, Michael Moore, in his attempt to show that Bush “stole” the election, takes this letter to the editor and digitally manipulates it to appear as if it was a Pantagraph headline written on December 10, 2001.
Look at the images, folks. There is absolutely no way this could have been an accident, or an editing glitch, or a typographical error. This is a flat-out lie. So, this truly begs the question, what was Moore’s motivation here? Why the need to lie? Did he think that nobody would catch on? Or was he so desperate to “prove” that Bush “stole” the election that he was willing to fabricate evidence to prove it? And if Moore is willing to fabricate evidence in this instance, how can you trust anything else he says?
Get the facts. If you’re a Michael Moore fan reading this, how much longer are you going to believe his lies?
Update: Just to head off the Moore-ons at the pass, there was only one edition of the newspaper that day. What you see here is what was printed. Besides, even if there was more than one edition, do you think that before the second printing the editors of the Pantagraph decided to take a letter to the editor and turn it into a headline for a paper that wasn’t going to be printed for five more days?
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