Getting it right

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

>andie nachgeborenen wrote:
>
>>You hold Doug up as a standard. I hold him up as an
>>ideal. Very few of us are as smart, fast, careful,
>>knowledgeable, and efficient as Doug. He's as good as
>>they come for that reason, and we should aspire to be
>>like him, but there aren't that many of us who are --
>>scholars or journalists. We should criticize the
>>errors of left (and other) journalists, but we have to
>>take their work for what it's worth even if it isn't
>>as good as Doug's.
>
>Why thanks a lot, but Moore can afford an army of researchers and 
>factcheckers, but he seems not to care. Those of us who try to get 
>our facts straight and our analysis bulletproof with very few 
>resources can do it, so it's kind of dispiriting when the 
>well-financed can't. Because there's no quicker way to discredit 
>yourself than to be caught fucking up on stuff that matters. And 
>when you're writing from the left, that goes quadruple at least. 
>When you're Robert Rector, it doesn't matter.
>
>Doug

I don't know exactly what errors Michael Moore made, and I'm not 
certain if the errors in question are of the sort that destroys the 
credibility of the entirety of his work or his character, or rather 
if the errors are of the kind that, if corrected, should allow his 
main points to stand.

In any case, it is possible that his audience does not see Moore as a 
journalist, regarding him as a satirist or purveyor of left-wing 
political humor instead.  With his new book and documentary, Moore is 
more popular than ever, most likely outselling all liberal and 
left-wing journalists in the USA, and this despite his having 
publicly challenged the powerful interest group that practically 
destroyed the academic career of a former Emory historian Michael A. 
Bellesiles: the NRA.
-- 
Yoshie

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