WikiLeaks Meets Michael Moore

Anyone still needing proof of how abysmally sick the U.S. health care system is, continue reading. The entire system, as well as the American media, is so incredibly disgusting and devoid of any seriousness on the topic it’s enough to make one scream. Just look at one story of what happened when WikiLeaks met Michael Moore.

Michael Moore, to my knowledge, is the only critical filmmaker in the United States. He did the 2008 film “Sicko,” in which he took on an American health care system that is extremely expensive and not particularly effective, mainly because health care in the U.S. is based on making profits for the insurance industry and forgetting about the people. In his film, Moore took three 9/11 first responders to Cuba for medical treatment that they were unable to get in the United States. On his blog, Moore reports that the insurance companies spent millions of dollars trying to come up with anything to use against him as soon as they learned what was in his film. The U.S. Treasury Department under George W. Bush even advised Moore they were looking into whether he might have broken any U.S. laws in taking American citizens to Cuba.

Then the insurance industry, already quoted as saying that “Michael Moore should be pushed off a cliff,” began working with Cuban-exile groups centered mainly in the Miami area. They began bad-mouthing Moore as well. In Cuba, an official agent of the U.S. government made up a story designed to put both Cuba and Michael Moore in a bad light and sent it as a confidential memo to his headquarters in the United States. It claimed that Moore’s film had been censored by Cuban officials and would be forbidden in Cuba. The hospitals shown in Moore’s film, the memo went on to say, weren’t accessible to ordinary Cubans and the government didn’t want them to see such health care facilities. That story was made up out of whole cloth. The truth is that Moore’s “Sicko” was shown in many Cuban movie theaters with a Spanish soundtrack and wasn’t censored whatsoever. The hospitals depicted in the film not only really existed, but they were freely available to Cuban citizens. After the end of the film’s run in movie theaters, “Sicko” was shown uncut on Cuban prime-time television.

Then WikiLeaks got into the game. The secret diplomatic dispatch sent by that agent in Cuba claiming the film had been banned there was released to the public on Dec. 17 by WikiLeaks. At that point, the government’s game was up. What happened after that? The American media reported the story, but they reported it exactly backward. They never checked to see if the Cubans had actually banned Moore’s film, but they reported it had because that was what was claimed in the putative dispatch. Fox News, America’s right-wing mouthpiece, reported the story twice and so did Reason magazine. Spectator, Hot Air and a number of other right-wing blogs picked up on the story without bothering to verify the facts. Even the British newspaper The Guardian swallowed it. Later on, BoingBoing and The Nation followed suit. No one in the U.S. media bothered to check whether the claim of Cuban censorship was true. The U.S. agent’s claims were just passed along piecemeal to the American public despite the fact that any thinking person would quickly come to the conclusion it deserved to be checked out. That’s exactly why WikiLeaks posted the dispatch on the Internet: to show how often such “reports to the homeland” are nothing more than lying propaganda. Any journalist doing even the minimum required, i.e. doing a Google search of “Sicko” to see whether it had actually been banned in Cuba, would have discovered in 20 seconds that the claim was nothing more than a smear attempt by U.S. agents that should have put it in the lowest category of journalism (but perhaps that’s the only journalistic category). Apparently American newsrooms can’t even spare 20 seconds for the truth anymore.

What officially passes for journalism these days doesn’t begin in the slightest to match the definition; unverified correspondents’ reports are just passed along to the public and even the reports themselves are nothing more than “entertainment,” confirmations of conventional wisdom or such abbreviated accounts that the term “information” doesn’t even apply to them anymore. Actual investigative journalism, as it’s practiced by Michael Moore or as contained in the WikiLeaks revelations, is so rare that the instances of it might all be counted on the fingers of one hand. On his blog, Michael Moore reports with relish what the Cuban health care system has been able to accomplish in one of the world’s poorest countries while simultaneously forced to contend with a U.S. economic boycott: The infant mortality rate there is lower than in the United States and life expectancy for adults is a mere seven months less (thus higher than in almost every other industrialized nation), and the World Health Organization has determined that Cuba trails only two industrialized nations when it comes to the quality of health care.

Well, one should take all this in slowly and think long and hard about what it all means. Then look at the headline again.