Moore's representation of the working class

Dennis Perrin dperrin at comcast.net
Tue Apr 9 07:00:21 PDT 2002



> I don't know much about Michael Moore, but I think he's more to the
> left than his TV/movie persona lets on, especially concerning US
> foreign policy. He apparently lost his _Mother Jones_ editorship
> over his defense of the Sandinistas (though that's not what his
> character says in _Roger & Me_), for instance.
> --
> Yoshie

What happened was that Moore refused to run a Paul Berman piece about the contras that had been commissioned before he was hired. He thought it tilted toward the contra view (Berman? imagine that!) and said that no left mag that he edited would publish such trash. Mo Jones honcho Adam Hochschild stepped in and ordered Moore to run it. Then Cockburn, in his Beat the Devil column (back when it was two pages and a must-read) took on Hochschild and Berman and defended Moore. Eventually, Moore left the mag with a cash settlement (don't know how much) and went on to make "Roger & Me," in which he dismisses his time at Mo Jones by saying that they wanted him to run pieces about herbal teas.

An old Mo Jones staffer once told me that Moore was out of place at the mag, that his Michigan working class demeanor rubbed the San Francisco libs the wrong way, that the whole thing was a bad fit from the start.

DP



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list