At the start you could almost see Martha MacCallum, the blondilicious Fox News anchor, licking her right-wing chops.
Ooh, goody! An interview with the makers of “Manufacturing Dissent,” an exposé of Michael Moore. It’s going to be juicy!
Well, it was. But not in the way MacCallum intended. I had a sense that film makers Rick Caine and Debbie Melnyk weren’t going to toe the Fox line when Melnyk began by referring to themselves as “good lefties from Canada.”
They set out to make a positive movie about Michael Moore, being admirers of both his work and politics. Eventually, though, Caine and Melnyk got disturbed by Moore’s resistance to having a lens turned on him.
And they found that Moore actually was able to interview General Motors chairman Roger Smith, a focus of his “Roger and Me,” yet left that footage out of the movie.
MacCallum, though, couldn’t get them to trash Moore. Melnyk said, “We believe in his ideology.” Then Caine burst in with:
At the core here, Martha, what we’re talking about is truth-telling via the media. So for us to sit here and act as if Michael is the only person buffaloing the American public is a little disingenuous.”
After noting Moore’s failure to come clean about his Roger Smith interview, which negated much of the premise of “Roger and Me,” Caine added:
But, you know, look—we’re in a time where we have 650,000 people who died in Iraq. We have over 3,000 soldiers dead, scores more injured. So again, for us to sit here and act as if the only thing going on is that Michael Moore is not the greatest guy and isn’t always doing the right thing, on occasion we need to turn to real power and discuss serious issues.
MacCallum tries again, unsuccessfully, to get Melnyk to dish some dirt on Moore. Caine changes the subject to an uncomfortable subject for Fox News: truth telling.
And it is the case that both sides of the political divide that we’re talking about, Martha, when they don’t tell the full, fair, and honest truth—if someone is willing to lie for the cause, like a major news organization for instance, it poses all kinds of problems for democracy.
We live in an elective democracy. We want a well-functioning democracy. The only way we can make that happen is through a well-informed electorate. And the media has to tell the truth. I don’t care which side of the divide you’re on. We’ve got to knock off the lies and tell the truth to the American public, and do the right thing.
Oops. “Major news organization.” These guys are hitting too close to home.
MacCallum draws the interview to a quick close with a “I think you’re absolutely right about that.” (Which, if she had really meant it, would’ve been followed by “I’m quitting my job.”)
Here’s the clip that I YouTubed:
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The ‘TRUTH’ is we are not a democracy, we are a Republic.