The Sicko Double Standard
In CNN’s hit piece on Sicko (in which they congratulate themselves for “keeping them honest”), they claim Moore “fudged the facts” because Moore’s numbers don’t match match theirs. When Moore got a chance to confront Sanjay Gupta with his own “fudging”, the Michael Moore double standard made itself clear.
With all of the cross-talk and interruptions in last night’s mini-debate, the exchanges aren’t exactly transcript friendly, so forgive me for editing these for clarity. Here’s a link to the full transcript and you can find a video of the segment here.
MOORE: This year Health and Human Services says that we’re going to spend about $7,400 per person in this country, not 6,000, as Dr. Gupta said. He’s using 2004 statistics.Now, here’s the sad thing about this, Larry, is that this is now the third time this report ran. It first ran on “ANDERSON COOPER” right after I was on your show on June 29.
The day before, on June 28th, we spoke to Dr. Gupta’s senior producer, Chris Gajilan, and we gave her in — writing — all the facts and all the evidence and the backup for those facts. So they’ve known now since June 28th that all their facts are wrong –
. . .
GUPTA: Well, you know, look, we try and look for some of the best sources that we can possibly find, because we think we owe that to our viewers.You know, Michael has a lot of different numbers here and he’s pulling them from different places.
. . .
MOORE: I posted this e-mail that we had with your producer a day before this report ran so that you had all the facts. You ran the story knowing that the facts were wrong and I posted this five minutes ago –
. . .
GUPTA: Just because you say they’re wrong, I mean it doesn’t make it so, Michael. I mean we try and do what you do. We try and get the best available data
It’s okay if CNN’s numbers are questionable because they’re trying to get “the best available data”, but if Moore’s numbers don’t line up with theirs, he’s a liar. This is ridiculous. There are so many different healthcare studies being done around the world that there is no definitive set of data. If you choose to quote the numbers from Health and Human Services over the World Health Organization, it doesn’t mean you’re trying to deceive people. You just made a different judgment call. CNN’s failure to understand that is what’s most infuriating about their “fact check” segment they used to trash Sicko (and avoid getting angry phone calls from wingnuts).
This other bit from Gupta, attempting to trash France’s heathcare system, is laughably bad :
GUPTA: I also think the whole idea, Michael, of just calling it a free system I think is a little bit nebulous to people who don’t fully understand what you mean by that. Yes, you’ve got to raise taxes significantly. I mean France is drowning in taxes. They’re running a $15.6 billion debt.
$15.6 billion! That would be scary if we weren’t spending that much money every month in Iraq. In France, they’re willing to go into debt to keep their citizens from dying of preventable diseases and injuries. Here in America, we save our debt for wars and tax cuts.
14 comments »
Copy link for RSS feed for comments on this post or for TrackBack URI
Leave a comment
Line and paragraph breaks automatic, e-mail address never displayed, HTML allowed: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <code> <em> <i> <strike> <strong>
It’s that same habit of false equvilancies that dogs outlets like CNN because they get attacked for being “liberal media” by the bloggers on the right. So they set up absurd comparisons in the hope of seeming fair and balanced to the wingnutosphere.
The “But hold on…” section of the report that Moore cites on his Web site is a perfect example, it was absurd.
If someone told CNN “well, I think your report was good, despite of course that you fudged the facts in it…” would they think this was a compliment?
The only blatant untruth in the whole thing was on the part of CNN, which they corrected. By the way, did that strike anyone else as odd? Simply doctoring, excuse the expression, the original report to fix the original falsehood, then presenting it saying only “we want to keep the record straight”? If Michael Moore admitted that something or other were false and just showed up at the interview with a new edit of his movie that altered it.. wouldn’t that seem completely sleazy?
Double standard indeed. I thought Gupta was incredibly arrogant. The damage is that saying “fudged the facts” invalidates the entire piece, as a whole, which is just what the wingers want to hear. It was unfair and undeserved.
Comment by Timelagged — July 11, 2007 @ 1:07 pm
I used to think that I did not like “The Transformers” movie, but after reading your articles over the last week, I find that I often do not completely agree with you. Now, once again, I have found a grammatical error in your post. I think I just have to admit that if disliking the Transformers means agreeing with you, then I most definitely think that “The Transformers” is the greatest movie ever.
Comment by Autumn Harvest — July 11, 2007 @ 1:35 pm
[…] Moore vs. Gupta on Larry King via The Talent Show: GUPTA: I also think the whole idea, Michael, of just calling it a free system I think is a little bit nebulous to people who don’t fully understand what you mean by that. Yes, you’ve got to raise taxes significantly. I mean France is drowning in taxes. They’re running a $15.6 billion debt. […]
Pingback by JABbering Stooge :: Earth to Dr. Gupta: Leave the punditry to the professionals. :: July :: 2007 — July 11, 2007 @ 3:21 pm
I think CNN got their point across. It’s okay to say Michael Moore fudged the facts until they call us on it, then we apologize for our errors!
If was clearly transparent that the term “fudge the facts” was attempting to discredit and invalidate Michael Moore and Sicko in an attempt to influence viewers NOT to see it.
I personally want to thank CNN, Dr. Gupta and Larry King for letting the world see their FUDGING!
Comment by Reggie Cervantes — July 11, 2007 @ 4:12 pm
CNN is just kissing the asses of any potential–and/or current–health-care advertisers and their stockholders.
Comment by Doobie — July 11, 2007 @ 4:43 pm
France’s deficit, and our monthly Iraq spending, are both about equal to the incredibly bloated and scandalously overrun cost of the Big Dig here in Boston.
And don’t forget, because we don’t pay “taxes” for our health care, the wingnuts think it doesn’t matter what it costs. We pay shitloads more per capita than any other country, and we don’t even cover all of our people like dozens of other countries do. If we ran our healthcare system at Spanish levels of efficiency, the money we spend now, could cover every single person in North, South, and Central America, and everyone but Canada would do better. (I love saying “Spanish levels of efficiency”.)
By-the-way, a good source for health care stats is nationmaster.com. Their numbers are not always the most current, but they seem to do a good job of sourcing them, and making sure that they are comparable (just for example, on “Obesity rates” you can track all the way back to OECD spreadsheet, where reporting methods are discussed).
Comment by dr2chase — July 11, 2007 @ 6:28 pm
What is the real solution, if Michael Moore’s government sponsored universal health care is not the answer?
The crux of the “SICKO” documentary is the disconnect between our expectations and the reality of health care. We are expecting compassionate care from another human being, and instead we get a faceless corporation. The person behind the desk or window is an agent of a health care corporation, which is not a human being, whose primary goal is to increase corporate profit.
This is America, and corporate profit is good, the profit motive forming the basis America’s greatness. The basic problem is that a corporation is not a human being. Therein lies the fallacy of replacing a corporation with a government agency, neither of which is a human being, when what we really want is a human being to deliver compassionate health care, and assist in serious health care decisions.
Ultimately we must at some point ration health care to avoid national bancruptcy. We can’t provide everything for everybody. Moore’s film, SICKO replaces the corporate health company with the government agency as the agent of this care rationing.
My major point here, is that the larger issue which is ignored by the SICKO film, is the control of medical information, which then determines expenditure and rationing patterns. The control of medical information controls the money. This is explained fully at:
Review of “SICKO”, by Jeffrey Dach MD
Jeffrey Dach MD
Comment by Jeffrey Dach MD — July 11, 2007 @ 6:36 pm
What pisses me off is they decided not to give Moore the full hour on Larry King so they could interview Paris fucking Hilton, and now they force him to defend his movie against bulshit arguments.
CNN is less than worthless. Stuff like this is worse than Faux News, at least reasonable people realize Fox News is pure propaganda. CNN gets to lend an air of legitimacy to the same propagandistic crap.
Comment by Raznor — July 12, 2007 @ 12:25 am
I watched the original interview by chance and was really upset by it… particularly the part where Moore was calling Blitzer and CNN for taking big pharma sponsorship which creates a conflict of interest in their reporting — to which Blitzer replies that they run ads for Sicko during the breaks. Moore (rightly) points out that running 15 second spots is not the same as nightly sponsorship, prompting Blitzer to explain that well, CNN is a business and they have to make money. So he basically admits that it isn’t about journalistic credibility, it’s about making money.
I had a fun time yelling at the TV that night.
Comment by Mighty Ponygirl — July 12, 2007 @ 5:46 am
Wolf Blitzer and Sanjay Gupta–legends in their own minds, thanks to fudging the facts.
Comment by bob48burg — July 12, 2007 @ 6:01 am
[…] came to my attention courtesy of Greg Saunders: $15.6 billion! That would be scary if we weren’t spending that much money every month in Iraq. […]
Pingback by Easier than thinking « Sting of Reason — July 12, 2007 @ 6:53 am
“CNN’s failure to understand that is what’s most infuriating about their “fact check” segment they used to trash Sicko (and avoid getting angry phone calls from wingnuts).”
They understand. They only pretend not to.
Comment by rezboscace — July 12, 2007 @ 11:02 am
Of course the fundamental purpose of the “fact checking” is to obscure one of the main health care issue: Do U.S. citizens get good value for their health care dollar? It doesn’t matter whether you’re using data from 2004 or 2007, whether Cuba spends $229/person or $251, whether the US spends over $7,000/person or $6,096/person. What matters is do the data match the source, are they consistent, and most importantly what do the data tell us. There is no question that U.S. citizens spend more on health care than citizens in other OECD countries (on average) and receive a lower quality of care. Nobody debates that and CNN shouldn’t try to obscure that with their “fact-checking.”
Comment by rk — July 13, 2007 @ 9:35 am
Top 10 Reasons why CNN is better than the BBC World Service:
10) We can afford James Earl Jones to read our tagline. So there BBC!!
9) Graphics! You call those graphics!! Heck, we spend more on our graphics than you spend on your whole show!!! Shows what you get when you allow commercials to run half the time.
8) Larry King - I learn so much from that man!
7) BBC files stories from Mauritius and Mali and stupid countries like that that don’t even exist.
6) No crane shots in studio.
5) Who cares about the climate in Cambodia. Do they even *have* climate in Cambodia?
4) I like commercials. They’re almost as slick as the news itself!!
3) The BBC calls people “communist” or “socialist” like it’s some kind of sociopolitical viewpoint, instead of the evil mark of the beast we all know it to be. Who writes the copy at the BBC anyhow? Might it be… SATAN!!! RED CHINA!! RED CHINESE ILLEGAL ALIENS WORKING HERE ILLEGALLY TO GLOBALIZE AWAY THE JOBS OF THE AMERICAN MIDDLE CLASS FOR RED CHINESE MEXICANS!!!!!!?????? (That’s news, by the way.)
2) They talk too much. It hurts my head. I like my news short and snappy!
1)SHE IS TOO NEWS!!! AND HER CHIHUAHUA TOO!!!
Comment by Seesh — July 18, 2007 @ 8:03 pm