Pundits keep spinning Clark phone call (9/25)

By Bryan Keefer

Despite new information, a number of conservative pundits continue to spin the widely-debunked story of a phone call Democratic presidential hopeful General Wesley Clark says he received shortly after Sept. 11. (Read the whole column.)

9/25/2003 08:02:10 AM EST |

Moore admits to altering "Bowling for Columbine" DVD (9/23)

By Brendan Nyhan

In a new column on his website titled "How to Deal with the Lies and the Lying Liars When They Lie about 'Bowling for Columbine,'" filmmaker Michael Moore has admitted to altering a caption he inserted over a 1988 Bush-Quayle commercial in the film.

Moore lashes back at critics of the Academy Award-winning documentary in his column, denouncing "character assassination" and "make-believe stories." After blasting his critics, however, he finally concedes that he inserted a caption over a Bush-Quayle campaign commercial that did not appear in the original ad, which we documented when the movie was originally released. Moore then corrected a factual error in the caption in the DVD and VHS versions of the film. Moore writes:

Actually, I have found one typo in the theatrical release of the film. It was a caption that read, "Willie Horton released by Dukakis and kills again." In fact, Willie Horton was a convicted murderer who, after escaping from furlough, raped a woman and stabbed her fiancé, but didn't kill him. The caption has been permanently corrected on the DVD and home video version of the film and replaced with, "Willie Horton released. Then rapes a woman." My apologies to Willie Horton and the Horton family for implying he is a double-murderer when he is only a single-murderer/rapist. And my apologies to the late Lee Atwater who, on his deathbed, apologized for having engineered the smear campaign against Dukakis (but correctly identified Mr. Horton as a single-murderer!).

Moore does not, however, explain that he inserted this caption over the ad - which made no mention of Horton - in order to manufacture a direct link in the audience's mind with the Bush campaign (Bush discussed Horton extensively on the campaign trail but the famous ad mentioning him was run by a third-party group linked to Bush media advisor Roger Ailes).

The filmmaker also defends himself unconvincingly against several other charges in the column. He claims, for example, that the use of Lockheed Martin rockets as launch vehicles for Pentagon satellites justifies this statement to a spokesman in the film (which he does not quote):

"So you don't think our kids say to themselves, well gee, dad goes off to the factory every day and, you know, he built missiles. These were weapons of mass destruction. What's the difference between that mass destruction and the mass destruction over at Columbine High School?"

At one point Lockheed did build nuclear missiles at the plant in Littleton, Colorado, but not during the period in question (around the Columbine school shootings in 1999).

Moore also defends his presentation of former National Rifle Association president Charlton Heston's speech in Denver after the shootings, even linking to a transcript, but as David Hardy has shown, a comparison of the transcript with Moore's editing shows that it was presented substantially out of context.

It's progress that Moore has come clean about altering the caption and presented some evidence to try to back up his claims. However, close examination reveals that many of them still fall short.

Update 9/29 9:21 AM: Many readers have noted that this post does not address Moore's claim that the scene in which he picks up a gun at a bank was not staged. The reason we did not address it because he adds little new information to previous assertions. Forbes originally reported that the transaction was staged, which we confirmed with a bank employee when we first wrote about the magazine's findings, and that conclusion has been buttressed by independent reporting by Anthony Zoubek of the Daily Vidette at Illinois State and John Fund of the Wall Street Journal, both of whom interviewed bank employees. As such, absent further information corroborating Moore's claims and casting doubt on the bank employees who have spoken for the record, we stand by our previous statements.

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Related links:
-Moore alters "Bowling" DVD in response to criticism (Brendan Nyhan, 9/2/03)
-Viewer beware (Ben Fritz, 11/19/02)
-Spinsanity on Michael Moore

9/22/2003 10:06:08 PM EST |

The deceptive advocacy of Stephen Moore (9/22)

By Brendan Nyhan and Ben Fritz

Among the many opinion journalists writing about economics, Stephen Moore stands out - and not for good reasons. A prominent conservative anti-tax activist in Washington, Moore is president of the Club for Growth, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and a columnist and contributing editor to National Review. As such, he appears frequently on TV and in print arguing on behalf of tax cuts and against increased government spending. However, his career has been marked by a pattern of errors, deception and falsehood, many of which have been exposed by print and online commentators. (Read the whole column.)

9/22/2003 05:31:15 AM EST |

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