Fahrenheit 9/11 Controversy - Controversy Over The Film's Content

Controversy Over The Film's Content

Shailagh Murray described Fahrenheit 9/11 in The Wall Street Journal as a "harshly satirical and controversial portrait of the Bush presidency." Stephen Dalton of The Times wrote that the movie "hits enough of its satirical targets to qualify as an important and timely film." Desson Thomson says "there is more to Fahrenheit 9/11 than partisan ridicule. ... What's remarkable here isn't Moore's political animosity or ticklish wit. It's the well-argued, heartfelt power of his persuasion." Author and blogger Andrew Sullivan expressed the opposite view, writing that Moore's film is "deeply corrosive of the possibility of real debate and reason in our culture." Canadian journalist Linda McQuaig wrote in response to Sullivan: "Hell, the media shut down real debate long ago. It is precisely because the debate has been so thoroughly corroded by the mainstream media ... that Moore's film is being so gratefully received by so many." Denis Hamill considers Fahrenheit 9/11 to be a "corrective to the daily drumbeat of right-wing talk radio."

English-American journalist and literary critic Christopher Hitchens and Democratic politician Ed Koch contend that Fahrenheit 9/11 contains distortions and untruths and is propaganda. Hitchens also compared Michael Moore to Leni Riefenstahl in his critique for Slate magazine: "Here we glimpse a possible fusion between the turgid routines of MoveOn.org and the filmic standards, if not exactly the filmic skills, of Sergei Eisenstein or Leni Riefenstahl." He later labeled Moore "a completely promiscuous opportunist extremely callous person."

Author and political commentator Peter Holding called Hitchens' analogy "hysterical, unfair and offensive," adding that "some of the criticism directed towards Moore's film displays the very same characteristics for which Moore's film has been criticised". Fellow Slate columnist and Iraq war critic David Edelstein, though generally supportive of the film, wrote Fahrenheit 9/11 "is an act of counterpropaganda that has a boorish, bullying force", but called it a "legitimate abuse of power." Prominent left-wing intellectual Bernard-Henri Lévy agreed the war was "a bad idea", but was sympathetic to the neoconservative point of view and disagreed with what he perceived to be the film's "core" argument, that "we have no reason to be interfering" in the Middle East. Joe Scarborough alleges that Moore has ducked criticism and dodged interviews from both himself and Hitchens.

Moore has published both a list of facts and sources for Fahrenheit 9/11 and a document establishing agreements between the points made in his film and the findings of the 9/11 Commission (the independent, bipartisan panel directed by Congress and Bush to investigate the facts and circumstances surrounding the September 11 attacks).