I've not had much comment on Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11, but this story just strikes me as odd:

Filmmaker Michael Moore makes no apologizes for his Bush-bashing documentary "Fahrenheit 9/11," and his attorney says he'll make no apologies for its use of an Illinois newspaper headline, either.
The (Bloomington) Pantagraph says the headline, flashed briefly in the film, came from a letter to the editor about the 2000 presidential election recount but was doctored to look like a news story. Even the date was changed.
[...] Westside Productions attorney Devereux Chatillon acknowledged that Moore was two weeks off on the date of the headline, which read: "Latest Florida recount shows Gore won election."
But the mistake "did not make a difference to the editorial point ... and was in no way detrimental to (The Pantagraph)," the New York-based attorney wrote in a letter to the paper.

So why, if he was using it simply as a visual, and was going to have to change it anyway, did he not (a) find a headline from the correct period that said what he wanted, or (b) devise a different visual, or (c) dummy up a headline altogether? Why, instead, take a real newpaper clipping, change the context (Letter to the Editor becoming a news story), and alter the date, all ot make it look just the way he wanted it to?

It's not so much that, as Moore's attorney points out, the newspaper has suffered any harm. It's just ... well, I don't know, illustrative of Moore's documentary procedures, I guess.

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I just think of Mikey as the opposite number of Rush and O'Riley. They have umpteen hours of air time, he has a movie. They're just pissed because, one, someone's hitting back and, two, they don't get to go to Cannes -- aka Hottie Central. They get to go to assemblages of *heh heh heh* neoconservatives.

The "damage" was minimal as reflected by what was being sued for, namely $1.

To make an equivalence with Rush and O'Reilly doesn't follow. They engage in "spin" which consists of cherry picking evidence and doing analysis from that. For example, when there was only 32,000 jobs created in July as measured by the BLS business survey, Rush countered the 600,000 jobs created in the household survey, not noting that the former survey is considered more accurate. That's spin. If Rush showed a doctored screen shot of the BLS web site that showed his number then it would be equivalent to what Michael Moore did.

The damage to the paper was certainly minimal.

As someone highly skeptical of Mr. Moore to begin with, though, it strikes me that it does his credibility no good. That he's sloppy and dishonest -- and goes out of his way to be so -- in small things speaks poorly of his accuracy and honesty in larger things.

I am more disturbed not by Michael Moore personally but rather of the post-modern epistemology of which he is a symptom. A lie in the service of "truth" -- read being consonant with your ideological agenda -- is just fine. Or, the other side is doing it so it is just fine because our lies have lesser consequences. Thus, Pontius Pilate's famous question "What is truth?" gets answered with a shrug and a "whatever".

Agreed.