Moore v. Blitzer/Gupta

July 10, 2007

In case you missed it, this was an unusually lively discussion on CNN yesterday afternoon. To offer a little context, CNN’s Dr. Sanjay Gupta had just done a report criticizing Michael Moore’s “Sicko,” accusing Moore of being sloppy with some of the data included in the film. Wolf Blitzer had Moore on to respond.

So, who was right? In this instance, Moore was. Dean Baker noted one example in which Gupta criticized Moore for asserting that health care spending in the United States is $7,000 per person. Gupta said it was only $6,000. Gupta was wrong. “We go to the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services National Health Care Expenditure projections and find on Table 1, line 3, that projected per capita health care expenditure for 2007 is $7,498,” Baker noted, adding, “[CNN] should make a double apology, since the point was to show that Moore was sloppy with his numbers.”)

Moore documented a series of other demonstrable errors in the CNN report on his film, backed up by reliable footnotes.

But taking a step back, it’s probably also worth taking a moment to consider the significance of CNN running this kind of fact-checking piece in the first place.

Brian Beutler raises a very good point.

[I]n principle, I have absolutely no problem with journalists fact checking people like Michael Moore, as long as they do it accurately. The thing is that the four minute fact-checking video you can see embedded in this clip is exactly the sort of effort we should see on CNN after every one of the president’s major speeches and it should have been this way since the beginning. I realize that newsmen and pundits think they won’t be taken seriously if they don’t give Michael Moore’s work a second look.

So great. Give it a second look. And then give similar scrutiny to The Path to 9/11 and the State of the Union. And maybe then the media’s credibility ratings will outstrip, say, those of the president whose statements they never verify.

It’s not often major news outlets fact-check documentaries, but Michael Moore’s not just another documentary filmmaker, and healthcare is not just another public policy. So, I suppose it’s not a big surprise that CNN would give “Sicko” some close scrutiny.

But yesterday’s fact-checking segment was troublesome because a) the fact-checking segment needed to be fact-checked; and b) CNN is selective in what it chooses to fact-check.

This afternoon, for example, for no apparent reason, CNN aired an entire speech from the Senate floor from John McCain on Iraq and how much “progress” he’s seen in the country. Lots of senators deliver lots of speeches from the floor on the war; why CNN decided to give McCain uninterrupted airtime is a mystery.

But will we get a four-minute fact-checking segment to accompany the speech?

I can’t stand Gupta and his stupid “health” “reports” which sound suspiciously sound like Big Pharma ads, but this is funny especially when Moore turned the tables on Wolfie.

Seriously, look who advertises on CNN.
-health insurance companies
-Drug companies including ads for boner pills, heat meds, pain relievers etc.

They must defend the advertisers!

  • If there was ever an example of how Big Business controls most of the media, this is it.

    Moore’s topic scares the hell out of the deep-pocketed, largely Republican-supporting, status-quo medical industry (HMOs, Big Pharm, etc.). Through their surrogate media, in this case, CNN, the tripe from Gupta was meant only to plant that ‘seed of doubt’ among the viewing public that things aren’t so bad. I’m glad that Moore smacked Wolf and the Gupta ‘story’ down, and hard. There’s a reason that Moore stated that it’s a rarity for him to be carried ‘live;’ –these same powers cannot edit a live broadcase. Let’s see if CNN posts the promised ‘corrections.’

    Ditto with the McCain speech. The powers-that-be need people to see that things are going just oh-so-swell in Iraq, and who better to make that statement than that ‘Maverick’ McCain?

  • I caught this live by pure coincidence, and I’m glad I did: it was one of the most satisfying rants I’ve seen in a while.

    I find it odd that CNN ran a new ‘fact-checking’ piece only a few days after they posted an article online saying that the facts were for the most part accurate. Evidently this wasn’t good enough for Gupta.

    The truth is, the ‘media narrative’ about Moore is that he’s dishonest, just like the ‘media narrative’ about Gore in 2000. If they can’t find facts to match that narrative, they’ll just make their own.

  • Don’t hold your breath.

    Another troubling part of Gupta’s ‘fact-check’ is that even assuming (erroneously) the numbers were closer to Gupta’s than Moore’s, Gupta is clearly trying to tarnish Moore over very small differences. So what if the number for the US was more like $6,000 than $7,000, and if the numbers from Cuba were more like $250 than $25. The very clear facts to be derived from either set of numbers is that things are really very mucked up in the US by comparison to most measures, and that this piece by Gupta and CNN was designed to be a hit piece on Moore.

  • If CNN fact-checked politicians and did a good job, that would be real journalism, so we can’t have that. We don’t have journalism, we have corporate media, and their job is not to present facts, their job is to make shareholders richer.

    BTW, Michael Moore spent a lot of time really ripping into Blitzer for the Iraq War cheerleading, and that must have stung. It was about time someone did it!

  • I watched it live yesterday and it was something. When Moore slammed Wolf about why it took him four years to catch on enough to go after Cheney, Wolf looked like someone had punched him in the stomach. And he defended Gupta like someone had dishonored his spouse.

    But lets give CNN credit for one thing: if Fox ran a hit piece on Sicko, would they give Moore an immediate, live opportunity to respond, and then when it ran long, offer Moore additional time on tape to be played the next day?

    CNN is right to fact check (and while the Gupta tape was hardly ideal, the CNN.com story had already said Sicko was largely correct); and right to give those they fact check a chance to fight back. Now if we could just get them to be a little more consistent in when to do these good things, we’d have some real progress!

  • Moore was right on and some corporation wanted to discredit him and that was the best they could come up with. It was insulting for CNN then to turn around and pretend to be a news organization when they preform hit man services on corporate enemies and promote lies from corporate buddies like the WH and certain republican senators who support war. CNN= Corporate News Network… more and more these days. I was so proud of Moore for calling them out on it.

  • Did any one catch Gupta’s correction this morning. He admits that Moore did say $251 and not $25 as the cost per person for healthcare in Cuba, but then he says that Moore even admits on his website that the actual cost is $229, as Gupta had reported in his original fact-check exercise. Gupta doesn’t understand why Moore wouldn’t have just used the right number in the first place. Unfortunately, if you go to Moore’s website, he says $229 is from the WHO, while $251 is from a BBC report. Imagine if he had used the lower number. Gupta or others would certainly have pointed to the $251 and claimed Moore was fudging the numbers. That said, Gupta is still the most trusted name on CNN, along with the weatherman.

  • Did Gupta explain why he said the $25 number? That’s the kind of thing that would happen to a spokesparrot, not a real doctor who did his own research.

    Tool.

  • To report that Michael Moore “fudged” the figures in a report that seemed to “fudge” the figures is assinine. To report “and he did fudge” is to me libel. The mere statement on national TV insinuated dishonesty. There is nothing dishonest in advocating universal health care for all Americans. The dishonesty witnessed on such occasion is the dishonesty of the vested interests who wish to kick sand in the eyes of the American public on this issue much like Scooter Libby kicked sand in the special prosecutor’s eyes. It reads like this to me: “We are comfortable with telling you lies so we can keep our profitable vested interests unchecked and unaccountable.” In CNN’s case, it can’t risk insulting its revenue base – you know, the pharmos and HMO sets; and in Scooter’s case, protection of higher ups was to be achieved at any cost.

    Yes, there is trouble in River City, and it does start with a capital T for “I’m TIRED of the culture of corruption this Adminstration has let loose upon our republic. -Kevo

  • Daniel wrote: “Unfortunately, if you go to Moore’s website, he says $229 is from the WHO, while $251 is from a BBC report.”

    This is another huge irritation about the ‘fact-checking’ that CNN does: any societal statistic is going to have some uncertainty associated with it. The real questions should be: Do Moore’s facts come from a reliable source? (Yes.) Are other uncited but reliable sources in agreement with the ones cited? (Yes.) Is the certainty/uncertainty in the facts well-represented? (Yes.)

    Criticizing someone simply for using the numbers from one study instead of another is inherently absurd, and suggests that Gupta is inherently dishonest, inherently stupid, or both.

  • After Fahrenheit 9/11 came out there was a lot of to-do about it not being accurate, and I thought that was a lot of hype and spin, overblown, and not adequately challenged. I read a big list online of some 70-something (if I’m remembering correctly) supposed fabrications and inaccuracies in the film, but when I read them, I thought a lot of them were unfair, the kind of right-wing points we debunk on this blog every day. I don’t think a good enough effort was made to challenge them. At the time, I was going to write a blog post to counter each (or most) of those points, but I never got around to it because I was too busy. The film may have had some inaccuracies and a little unfair editing of clips, but a lot of it was not that egregious or actually had to be characterized as dishonest- you had to predisposed to look at it a certain way to say Moore was distorting.

  • I caught a brief piece that CNN was showing on their “Headline News” (Headloon?) division which seemed edited to present them as some sort of unfairly injured “objective” organization and Moore as a leftie wacko. Gupta was shown apologizing for his misinterpretation of $250 to $25, but the weight of the piece still tried to show Moore as the raving liar.
    I was surprised to see even this since Headline News usually worries about plane crashes, Brittany, and Paris. It suggests there is a concerted effort to discredit Moore since they actually preempted these more important stories.
    I didn’t quite hear it clearly but I also thought I heard Blitzer essentially admitting to Moore that they weren’t entirely a news organization but a business. With responsibilities (indirectly to their advertisers?). Duhh!

  • “We don’t have journalism, we have corporate media, and their job is not to present facts, their job is to make shareholders richer”

    This is the most important fact we have to remember. Just like the company I work for… sure we make products etc., but we are in the BUSINESS of making MONEY for the shareholders, nothing else. The end justifies the means.

  • Like in Fahrenheit 9/11, Moore might have said “$1,000,000” as some figure. And then the right-wing fact checked it and found out a more accuarate number was $900,000. And this was held up as a huge lie and an example that the whole piece and all its opinion and implicit argument could not be believed and had no merit. But how significant was the $100,000 error in the context of that much money- only getting it wrong by that much. So pointing out the “mistake” was more dishonest, as far as being a distortion, than accidentally doing the math wrong on the figure and not double checking it adequately.

    Same thing here- even if Moore was wrong, was being off by that much really a point worth raising? Or just a flailing attempt to try to create a perception of a smog of untrustworthiness hanging about Moore?

  • But the worst thing about Fahrenheit 9/11 was the left didn’t come to Michael Moore’s defense quick enough.

  • BTW, Michael Moore spent a lot of time really ripping into Blitzer for the Iraq War cheerleading, and that must have stung. It was about time someone did it!

    I know its only tangential to the main pont of this blog post, but i have to agree. I don’t always like Moore’s approach, but I applaud that!

  • hey, if gupka’s a doctor and a brilliant journalist — as woof proclaims — maybe he should take a look at lou dobbs’ report on the thousands of leprosy cases that the dirty brown mexicans are bringing into the homeland….

  • Two points.

    CNN is absolutely guilty of chickenshit journalism. Anyone who works with surveys and statistics knows that discrepancies are normal. The small discrepancies CNN noted did not significantly affect the point of Moore’s movie.

    Despite some excellent work, Moore makes himself a target by acting like a wacko. His rant started out reasonable and controlled and he made some excellent points. But he kept going, and going,and going. In the process, he undermined his own credibility by appearing deranged.

  • Would that CNN had fact checked those 16 little words….. the Swift Boaters….. any of the run up to the war….. the AlQ all the time in Iraq now….. the Iranian IEDs….. etc………..

    Moore did a fine job, we need all of our leftish public figures to continue.

  • The issue here is that we as Americans have to stop believing senseless propaganda which insults our common sense. We know for our own experiences with the health care system in this country that it is broken. We know from our own interactions with people from Canada and other nations that they have systems that they are generally happy with. If Gupta wants to put lipstick on a pig and call it Jessica Beale – we should be smart enough to say, sorry sir, you are just wrong.

    Perhaps its time we stop attacking and fact checking independent film makers, who we do not elect or fund, and start fact checking and attacking those we elect and fund in office.

  • It’s so funny to see you socialists spin yourself into a frenzy. Healthcare system got you down? Jealous of Cuba? Then move to Cuba, get your healthcare there. I doubt you will, because your somewhat sane subconscious knows you’d rather have the blade in the hand of an American doctor, and recover using big pharma’s drugs then take your chances at la hospital down south. In the end, this is just another freebie you want so that you don’t have to pay for your bills. What next, tax payer supported cars? What isn’t the government responsible for providing you? Socialize this country all you want, capital and capitalists can always move beyond these shores when the environment turns hostile to open business practices. And when the capital and the capitalists have moved on to the next land that realizes supply and demand cannot be subverted, you’ll be in a country that cannot afford all the socialist promises.

  • .

    According to the Department of Health and Human Services 2008 Data:

    Dr. Sanjay Gupta is *projected* to be an even bigger Douche Bag than in 2007!

    Please be advised that these are *PROJECTED* numbers, but according to the 2005 data, Dr. Gupta was a very big Douche back then as well.

    .

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