{"id":11399,"date":"2007-07-10T13:45:13","date_gmt":"2007-07-10T17:45:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/archives\/11399.html"},"modified":"2007-07-10T13:45:13","modified_gmt":"2007-07-10T17:45:13","slug":"moore-v-blitzergupta","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/moore-v-blitzergupta\/","title":{"rendered":"Moore v. Blitzer\/Gupta"},"content":{"rendered":"

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.<\/p>\n

<\/param><\/param><\/embed><\/object><\/p>\n

So, who was right? In this instance, Moore was. Dean Baker noted<\/a> 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.”)<\/p>\n

Moore documented a series of other demonstrable errors<\/a> in the CNN report on his film, backed up by reliable footnotes.<\/p>\n

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.
\n
\nBrian Beutler raises<\/a> a very good point.<\/p>\n

[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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

But will we get a four-minute fact-checking segment to accompany the speech?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11399","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11399","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11399"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11399\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11399"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11399"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11399"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}