Sunday, June 27, 2004

Movements to muzzle Michael Moore backfire

'Fahrenheit 9/11' Number One with less than 900 theaters!

Clarence Page - Chicago Tribune: Pollsters tell me that people tune in to radio conservatives to be entertained and to be informed, but more often than not, to be hardened even more firmly in their views. The preacher preaches, the choir listens.

All of which makes it even more amusing to me that so many people are trying desperately hard to put a muzzle on Moore's little movie, simply because they don't like its politics. Most of them seem to be people who usually complain the loudest about liberal "political correctness."

First Walt Disney Co. blocked its Miramax division from distributing the film. Disney did not want to offend its family-oriented audience with divisive politics, a spokesman said at the time. Yet Disney doesn't appear to mind broadcasting conservative voices like Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity on its radio stations like WABC-AM in New York.

Then, as Moore found new distributors and a lot of free publicity, a new group called "Move America Forward" drummed up a campaign to harass theater owners with phone calls into dropping the film. Created by a Republican public relations firm, the pro-Bush grass-roots movement grew out of the same letter-writing campaign that nagged CBS into dropping its TV movie, "The Reagans."

In response, the liberal MoveOn.org is encouraging people to support the movie. It doesn't need much help.

Let's hear it for the free marketplace of ideas.

Then another conservative group called Citizens United found another target, the movie's ads, claiming they're political enough to violate new campaign-finance laws.

Granted, the ads don't make Bush look like the brightest bulb on the scoreboard. (el - see below.)

Citizens United, headed by David Bossie, author of an anti-Bill Clinton book, knows a lot about negative ads. The organization produced the famous "Willie Horton" ads against Democratic presidential hopeful Michael Dukakis in 1988 and the "Gennifer Flowers" ads against Bill Clinton in the 1990s. As grass-roots organizations go, this one appears to be rooted largely in Astroturf.

Fortunately, Moore's film and its ads probably fit under the law's exemption for news media. Or, at least, they should. If not, Citizens United will have done us all a favor, in my view, by exposing the law's questionable infringements on free speech to a wider audience.

This harassment from the right does not seem to trouble Moore much. "I am deeply concerned about whether or not the FEC [Federal Election Commission] will think I paid Citizens United to raise these issues," he told a reporter, with his tongue firmly in cheek. "How else can you explain the millions of dollars of free publicity this right-wing group has given the movie? I plan on sending them a very nice holiday card this year."

Send one for me too, Mike. After all, my family and I were eager to see your movie entirely because so many other people didn't want us to.

Now I cannot thank those would-be critics enough. The movie succeeded in its mission: It was funny, shocking, provocative, entertaining and occasionally tear-jerking.

Most important, when the curtain came down, that was not the end of the discussion. It was only the beginning.

el - KTRH, the popular all news radio in Houston, had the movie the topic of the day for listener comments Friday.

My favorite dumb comment was someone saying, "they must have animated and altered Bush's face to keep making him look so dumb."

;-) Sorry folks, that is your President in all his glory.


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