Sullivan's sloppy response (4/3)

By Brendan Nyhan

In a response to my post from yesterday, Andrew Sullivan attacks me at length on his website today. Let me answer the charges.

Here's the passage in question from an article in the Sunday Times of London:

There is also barely a mention in Moore's book about the current war on terrorism. You can understand why. It raises questions the left simply doesn't want to answer.

First, note that in a post early this morning, Sullivan admitted that he was not familiar with the circumstances surrounding the book's release and that it was misleading to say that there was "barely a mention" of the war:

BEING FAIR TO MOORE: Several of you have alerted me to the fact that I was wrong to criticize Michael Moore for not mentioning the war on terror in his latest screed. The book apparently went to press on September 10 and therefore couldn't be changed. I'm sorry I missed this fact. Nevertheless, it still strikes me as somewhat unconvincing. If Moore had wanted to address the issue, HarperCollins could easily have adjusted its press run, added an extra chapter, or some such exigency. They had several months to make changes. But hey, I should have noted the press run issue in the piece. My apologies for that.

Yet he claims that there are no factual errors in his piece in his post facto justification this afternoon:

The defenders of Moore say that his book went to press before September 11 and therefore this criticism is redundant. Huh? Here's a piece from Salon in January that shows that Moore could have changed the book if he wanted to, that the publishers wanted him to, but he refused...

While it's true that the book could have been changed (although the publisher reportedly wanted Moore to pay for it), it's obviously disingenuous to use this as a justification for something Sullivan wrote before he knew about any of this. Let me reiterate: there is no mention of the war on terrorism in the book because it was written before September 11. None. Not "barely a mention". None. As Tom Tomorrow pointed out, "barely a mention" conveys the clear impression that Moore wrote the book after September 11 and intentionally avoided mentioning the war – a misleading suggestion at best.

Sullivan, however, is not done with Moore – or with me. In addition to failing to respond to the rest of my criticism, he takes two cheap shots at me as a "a supporter and former sponsor of Moore's" and someone with "an agenda" for my role in bringing Moore to Swarthmore College several years ago, which I disclosed fully in the original post. Guess he missed the long article criticizing Stupid White Men that my co-editor Ben Fritz just wrote, which unlike any other article on the book to date (including Sullivan's) exposes its numerous factual inaccuracies and distortions. (Note: Ben worked with me to help bring Moore to Swarthmore.)

I hope Sullivan will set the record straight soon.

Clarification - 4/5 10:55 AM: The phrase "the publisher reportedly wanted Moore to pay for" changing the book refers to the fact that, according to published reports, HarperCollins requested that Moore assign $100,000 of his royalties to cover half of the printing costs for the books that had already been printed, not the entire cost of those books as the phrasing above might suggest.

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Related links:
-Sullivan's sloppiness (Brendan Nyhan, 4/2)
-Spinsanity on Andrew Sullivan

4/3/2002 12:27:13 PM EST |

One Moore stupid white man (4/3)

With his factually challenged bestseller, Michael Moore becomes an unfortunate poster boy for dissent
By Ben Fritz
[First published on Salon.com (Salon Premium subscription required)]

Satirist Michael Moore's "Stupid White Men" is full of egregious errors and sloppy distortions. Regrettably, he gets his facts wrong again and again and again, and a simple check of the sources he cites shows that lazy research is often to blame.

[This column was available exclusively to Salon Premium subscribers on Salon.com. We hope you'll consider signing up through our affiliate link for immediate access to our newest work, as well as all the other good stuff on Salon Premium.]

4/2/2002 10:28:33 PM EST |

Sullivan's sloppiness (4/2)

By Brendan Nyhan

In the last few days, pundit Andrew Sullivan has been notably sloppy with his facts. First, in an article for the Sunday Times of London, Sullivan criticized filmmaker and author Michael Moore for not discussing the war on terrorism in his new book Stupid White Men:

There is also barely a mention in Moore's book about the current war on terrorism. You can understand why. It raises questions the left simply doesn't want to answer.

If Sullivan had looked up even one of the many articles on Moore and the circumstances surrounding the release of his book, he would know that it was finished prior to September 11 -- the planned release on October 2 was put on hold until December, when HarperCollins finally decided to allow publication to go forward with the book unaltered.

In a post early this morning, Sullivan made another obvious error. He criticizes a New York Times story for not providing evidence that President Bush is facing criticism of his handling of the conflict in the Middle East. "I read the story interested in finding perhaps evidence of these critics," he writes. "The Times cites one, Senator Joseph Lieberman. So where's the rising tide of criticism?"

But if you read the story, you see that the story cites both Lieberman and Senator Arlen Spector of Pennsylvania as critics of Bush, and features a quote from Specter, not Lieberman:

[S]ome in Congress like Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, a Connecticut Democrat, and Senator Arlen Specter, a Pennsylvania Republican, say Mr. Bush has not committed enough of his time, energy or prestige to the peace effort.

"I believe that the president does have to get more deeply involved," Mr. Specter said.

It's certainly true that the story provides little evidence of mounting criticism of Bush (and that it mostly ignores criticism from the right, as Sullivan pointed out in a follow-up post). Nonetheless, he has a responsibility to do at least a cursory check of the facts before launching one of his trademark broadsides.

Sullivan has a habit of not taking the time to check his sources before writing about them -- consider his deceptive attack on a supposed example of bias in more frequent labeling of conservatives than liberals, which he sourced to US Newswire, a press release service that probably appeared to be a media outlet to most readers (his link actually pointed to a news advisory by Judicial Watch, a conservative watchdog group, as Bob Somerby pointed out). Sullivan also played a key role in repeating false claims about Bill Clinton's Georgetown speech without having actually seen the speech (he later moderated his comments after reading a transcript).

Maybe the increasing success of Sullivan's site will help pay for a fact checker.

[Disclosure: My co-editor Ben Fritz and I helped bring Moore to speak at Swarthmore College while we were students there. Moore was paid an honorarium by the College for his speech.]

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4/2/2002 01:27:06 PM EST |

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