NY-Times - Will Michael Moore's Facts Check Out?

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June 20, 2004

Will Michael Moore's Facts Check Out?
By PHILIP SHENON

OLLYWOOD, Calif.

MICHAEL MOORE is not coy about his hopes for "Fahrenheit 9/11," his
blistering documentary attack on President Bush and the war in Iraq. He
wants it to be remembered as the first big-audience, election-year film that
helped unseat a president.

"And it's not just a hope," the Oscar-winning filmmaker said in a phone
interview last week, describing focus groups in Michigan in April at which,
after seeing the movie, previously undecided voters expressed eagerness to
defeat Mr. Bush. "We found that if you entered the theater on the fence, you
fell off it somewhere during those two hours," he said. "It ignites a fire
in people who had given up."

The movie's indictment of the president is nothing if not sprawling. Mr.
Moore suggests that Mr. Bush and his administration jeopardized national
security in an effort to placate Bush family cronies in Saudi Arabia, that
the White House helped members of Mr. bin Laden's family to flee the United
States after Sept. 11 and that the administration manipulated terrorism
alert levels in order to scare Americans into supporting the invasion of
Iraq.

Mr. Moore's previous films generated a cottage industry of conservative
commentators eager to prove sloppiness and exaggeration in his films; a
handful of mainstream critics have also found flaws. But if "Fahrenheit
9/11" attracts the audience Mr. Moore and his distributors are predicting,
Mr. Moore may face an onslaught of fact-checking unlike anything he