Fahrenheit 9/11: Documentary, Truth-telling, and Politics

On Monday, June 28, picking up my moderating duties on H-Film after seeing Fahrenheit 9/11 on the first weekend of its U.S. release, I asked list members for responses to the film. An impassioned and difficult discussion followed that provoked approximately 90 postings, almost 2/3 of which came during the two-week period immediately following. Another 30 or so posts were scattered over the next month, this latter group focused mainly on the controversy that had developed over the title's relationship to the title of Ray Bradbury's novel.

A less publicly visible aspect of the controversy was the number of posts rejected and returned for editing. H-Film is a moderated listserv with relatively strict rules regarding civil and reasoned discussion. As a matter of course, we do not allow posts that flame list members or engage in other forms of ad hominem argument. Though we seldom need to return posts for editing, during the first week of the discussion I suddenly found myself returning a large number of posts from both sides of the debate. The off-line negotiations over wording made me deeply aware of the difficulties we were having discussing the film, but the publicly visible online evidence of our conversation alone made our difficulty in establishing and maintaining a meaningful discussion richly apparent.

H-Film list is, like much of academia, more inclined to the liberal side of the political spectrum. Posts ran approximately three to one, liberal to conservative, although if one were to count authors rather than individual posts, the balance tilted much more precipitously to the liberal side. Without doubt, we got off to a difficult start. The first post compared Fahrenheit 9/11 unfavorably to Triumph of the Will.¹ That comparison provoked precisely the angry response one might have expected from a group like ours, and we were off to a rocky beginning.

In retrospect, what seems most significant and revealing about the discussion that followed was how tightly it conformed to a pattern. Moore's critics (mostly conservatives) tended to criticize the filmmaker more directly than the film, attacking both Moore's veracity and his ethics, so much so that I finally intervened to suggest that our prohibition of ad hominem argument should too include the filmmaker, not merely other list members. The most dominant assertion was that Moore was a liar, though the authors of some posts indicted him for insensitive or unethical treatment of his interview subjects as well. The argument about truthfulness often morphed into an argument about genre—specifically the contention by some that the film was not documentary, but rather propaganda.

Moore's defenders (mostly liberals) tended on the other hand to cast their responses in terms of a broader political discourse. They valued the film for its contribution to contemporary political debate, celebrating the fact that finally someone was raising publicly questions that neither the administration nor the mainstream press seemed prepared to discuss or even to recognize. A number of writers defended Moore's treatment of his subjects, and others engaged the genre argument, observing that opinionated discourse has always been in the mainstream of the documentary tradition. While some liberal critics who defended the film also conceded that its argumentative style might have been manipulative, few of them engaged directly the claims of untruthfulness made by critics, other than to observe that the claims of lying and inaccuracy were (in our discussion at least) almost completely unsubstantiated by evidence or even by specific counterfactual claims. This was a position that I initially took myself in an off-line discussion with a list member.

During that first week of the discussion, I intervened publicly twice more, hoping to produce a conversation in which people really did address issues raised by the other side, but I felt that I was largely ineffectual in doing so. And I should say here that certainly some of my difficulties stemmed from a number of predictable factors that had nothing to do with this particular film:

1. 1. a large number of list members had not yet seen the film...