Random Michael Moore Deceits [#3]

Michael vs. The Pantagraph [from Fahrenheit 9/11]

Shame, shame, Mikey. A newspaper news article is not equivalent to a Letter to the Editor.

Fahrenheit 9/11 begins with the unsubstantiated claim that Al Gore would have won a recount of the votes cast in the 2000 election. To buttress this claim Moore splices in a momentary shot of what appears to be a headline from a Florida newspaper: “LATEST FLORIDA RECOUNT SHOWS GORE WON ELECTION.”

The “headline” flashes past leaving in its wake a subliminal impression; it’s a message directed at the viewer’s subconscious mind. The message is “Gore really won; Bush is a usurper.” In a darkened theater the audience is a passive target of Moore’s subliminal messages, but at home anyone with a TV and a Tivo can freeze frame his propaganda flick and deconstruct it image by image. Freezing this “headline” identifies its origin as the December 5th, 2001 issue of the Bloomington, Illinois Pantagraph, which contained no such headline. This heading had appeared above a letter to the editor by a die-hard Gore voter who had bitterly objected to the Pantagraph’s conclusion that “the analysis doesn’t just validate the outcome of the 2000 election, it validates the American system.”

This heading was small and unimpressive, so Michael Moore had it re-typed and enlarged and then stripped it onto a phony recomposed newspaper page with an altered date and then he photographed it again so that the sulking Gore voters in his audience would feel validated in their paranoid sulk. Once again Moore has fabricated a false history using a fake document in order to create a false impression in the minds of an audience he does not respect. Just for the record: there were two recounts and Gore lost both of them.

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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.

[see photo at below link]

Well, my friends, as you will see the actual page looks absolutely nothing like what Moore presented onscreen.

[see photo at below link]

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 [news article] 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?

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Moore amplifies the deceit with a montage of newspaper headlines, purporting to show that Gore really won. One article shows a date of December 19, 2001, with a large headline reading, "Latest Florida recount shows Gore won Election." The article supposedly comes from The Pantagraph, a daily newspaper in Bloomington, Illinois. But actually, the headline is merely for a letter to the editor--not a news article. The letter to the editor headline is significantly enlarged to make it look like an article headline. The actual printed letter looked nothing like the "article" Moore fabricated for the film. The letter ran on December 5, not December 19. The Pantagraph contacted Moore's office to ask for an explanation, but the office refused to comment.

The Pantagraph's attorney sent Fahrenheit's distributor a letter stating that Moore's use of the faked headline and story was "unauthorized" and "misleading" and a" misrepresentation of facts." The letter states that Moore infringed the copyright of The Pantagraph, and asks for an apology, a correction, and an explanation. The letters asks Moore to "correct the inaccurate information which has been depicted in your film." Moore's law firm wrote back and claimed that there was nothing "misleading" about the fabricated headline.

Richard Soderlund, an Illinois State University history professor, who wrote the letter to the editor that The Pantagraph published, told the Chicago Tribune, "It's misrepresenting a document. It's at odds with history."

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