 |
         
|
A couple of summer movie releases were deemed newsworthy. Unlike ABC's publicity for Evan Almighty yesterday, with John Berman's (subscription required) soft animal feature, CBS and NBC both took the serious route. NBC's Andrea Mitchell celebrated Judea Pearl, the bereaved father of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, whose kidnapping and execution is the theme of the biopic movie A Mighty Heart. Mitchell praised the father for Making a Difference upon his son's death, setting up the Daniel Pearl Foundation to "fight back against the hatred between Moslems and Jews with fellowships for Moslem journalists and--another of Danny's passions--music." Mitchell made an unfortunate choice of words to describe father Pearl's mission, calling him "a global crusader."
CBS had Jeff Greenfield contemplate the impact of Michael Moore's activist documentary Sicko on Campaign 2008. The movie, with its "affecting stories of personal suffering at the hands of indifferent corporations" is propaganda for government-run single-payer universal healthcare. Greenfield observed that Moore himself concedes that Fahrenheit 9/11, his hit during Campaign 2004, "did not change many minds about President Bush." Greenfield fairly concluded that Sicko is "likely to have a much bigger impact at the box office than at the ballot box." What was unfair was when Greenfield asserted that "no one, Democrat or Republican, has come close to advocating the kind of government-run national health system" that Sicko endorses. Greenfield is entitled to ignore single-payer-proponent Dennis Kucinich if he wants, simply by inserting a qualifier such as "contending" or "viable"--as ABC's Tapper did with "frontrunner" in his Blackstone story. But then Greenfield should not illustrate his point with a soundbite from Wisconsin Republican Tommy Thompson, who is no more of a viable contender than the Ohio Democrat is.
UPDATE: Greenfield explains in a post by Brian Montopoli (text link) on the CBS blog Public Eye that he did not count Kucinich's proposal for a single-payer program as a "government-run national health system" because Kucinich would not turn physicians into federal workers, a system that Greenfield says Moore advocates in Sicko.
You must be logged in to this website to leave a comment. Please click here to log in so you can participate in the discussion.
