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None has broken through like Moore, and his detractors are perverse to say he is not a "professional journalist" when the role of the professional journalist is so often that of zealously, if surreptitiously, serving the status quo. Without the loyalty of these professionals on the New York Times and other august (mostly liberal) media institutions "of record", the criminal invasion of Iraq might not have happened and a million people would be alive today. Deployed in Hollywood's sanctum - the cinema - Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 shone a light in their eyes, reached into the memory hole, and told the truth. That is why audiences all over the world stood and cheered.
What struck me when I first saw Roger and Me, Moore's first major film, was that you were invited to like ordinary Americans for their struggle and resilience and politics that reached beyond the din and fakery of the American democracy industry. Moreover, it is clear they "get it" about him: that despite being rich and famous he is, at heart, one of them. A foreigner doing something similar risks being attacked as "anti-American", a term Moore often uses as irony in order to demonstrate its dishonesty. At a stroke, he sees off the kind of guff exemplified by a recent BBC Radio 4 series that presented humanity as pro- or anti-American while the reporter oozed about America, "the city on the hill".
Whiny jealousies
Just as tendentious is a documentary called Manufacturing Dissent, which appears to have been timed to discredit, if not Sicko, then Moore himself. Made by the Canadians Debbie Melnyk and Rick Caine, it says more about liberals who love to face both ways and the whiny jealousies aroused by tall poppies. Melnyk tells us ad nauseam how much she admires Moore's films and politics and is inspired by him, then proceeds to attempt character assassination with a blunderbuss of assertions and hearsay about his "methods", along with personal abuse, such as that of the critic who objected to Moore's "waddle" and someone else who said he reckoned Moore actually hated America - was anti-American, no less!