A slight correction on your Michael Moore bio. TV Nation was originally aan NBC-TV show. After NBC cancelled it (despite making respectable ratings in its time slot) it was picked up by Murdoch's network.
Jim Farmelant
On Fri, 22 May 1998 21:15:29 -0400 Louis Proyect <lnp3 at panix.com> writes:
>This is in reply to Mark Jones and anybody else on this mailing-list
>who
>needs some background.
>
>Michael Moore is from a working-class family in Flint, Michigan. His
>father
>was an auto-worker for GM and his uncle participated in the legendary
>Flint
>sit-down strikes in the late 1930s. Also participating in these
>strikes
>were Bert Cochrane and his wife Genora Dollinger, who were leaders of
>the
>Trotskyist movement. In the early 1950s Bert went into opposition to
>the
>SWP leadership because he thought that there was false optimism about
>the
>possibility of a working class radicalization. He went on to form the
>first
>"new left" magazine in the US, called American Socialist. I am a
>neo-Cochranite.
>
>Moore started a newspaper in the early 1980s called the Flint Voice.
>It was
>not unlike the myriad of alternative newspapers that got started in
>the
>1960s, except that it oriented to working-class issues and people.
>Autoworker Ben Hamper, who helped to edit the paper, wrote the
>highly-acclaimed "Rivethead : tales from the assembly line." The
>newspaper
>was financially and politically successful and eventually was sold to
>other
>interests. It was expanded and became known as the Michigan Voice.
>
>Moore's success got him an invitation to take over as editor at Mother
>Jones. During the contra war in Nicaragua, the magazine started to
>shift to
>the right. The publisher, whose name I can't recall, was a trust-fund
>rich
>kid whose family made its millions in South African diamond mining. He
>told
>Moore to publish an anti-Sandinista article by Paul Berman, who had
>been
>writing this kind of crap in the Village Voice for a couple of years.
>Moore
>told him that Berman was objectively assisting the Reagan
>administration
>and refused to print the article. For this he was fired.
>
>About a year after this happened, I broached the subject with Moore of
>debating Berman in NYC at an event sponsored by the Nicaragua
>Solidarity
>Committee. NACLA persuaded me that John Weeks, an idiot professor from
>Vermont, would be a better choice. So Weeks came down and he was
>totally
>unprepared. His analysis was a bunch of Maoist crap that he had kept
>hidden
>from us. So the debate turned into Weeks arguing that the Sandinistas
>were
>not radical enough and Berman arguing that they were too radical. One
>of my
>biggest regrets is that Moore was not invited.
>
>Shortly afterwards Moore's documentary film "Roger and Me" premiered.
>It is
>about his search to get a face-to-face interview with Roger Smith, the
>CEO
>of General Motors. He wanted to confront him about downsizing, while
>Smith
>keeps avoiding him. One of the more memorable scenes was Michael Moore
>on
>the Manhattan sidewalk in front of GM headquarters with a bullhorn
>imploring Smith to come down and talk to him. It was the
>highest-grossing
>documentary in US history.
>
>In the wake of the success of the film, Moore produced and hosted a
>show on
>Rupert Murdoch's network called "TV Nation." It had the same kind of
>satirical edge as the movie and was very successful in terms of
>ratings and
>critical recognition. Murdoch dumped it for obvious class reasons.
>
>Moore then wrote a book called "Downsize This," which is a satirical
>attack
>on downsizing. It made the NY Times bestseller list. The movie "The
>Big
>One" recounts his nation-wide tour promoting the book and getting into
>the
>kinds of shenanigans depicted in "Roger and Me," except with different
>corporate targets. He also made a movie about US-Canadian economic
>tensions
>(I believe) called "Canadian Bacon" which I have not yet seen. It was
>only
>in NY briefly and not as critically acclaimed as "The Big One."
>
>Moore's financial success and outspoken views on the problems of the
>left
>have made him a lightning rod for critics within the left. His most
>outspoken opponent is the irascible Alexander Cockburn who faults
>Moore for
>living in luxury and being aloof from grass-roots organizations. It
>should
>be understood, however, that Moore is a major philanthropist for left
>causes. Nobody, including Cockburn, denies this.
>
>More controversial is a Moore column that appeared in the Nation a
>while
>back. He says that the US left fucked up in the 1980s by running off
>to
>Nicaragua instead of working in places like Flint. Well, okay, I don't
>necessarily agree with this since that was what I was doing and I
>don't
>like getting my own ox gored. But he does have a point. In any case,
>the
>age of anti-imperialist revolutions might be behind us anyhow (except
>for
>Chiapas and Indonesia this week). If we are going to get our act
>together
>on the domestic front, we have to clean a lot of mothballs out of the
>closet. On this I agree with Moore's general approach. At any rate the
>questions he has raised are of fundamental concern to socialist or
>radicals.
>
>Louis Proyect
>(http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)
>
_____________________________________________________________________ You don't need to buy Internet access to use free Internet e-mail. Get completely free e-mail from Juno at http://www.juno.com Or call Juno at (800) 654-JUNO [654-5866]