I'm calling BS on the "Defence of Michael Moore" article, at least where it says Moore was being "unintentionally deceptive". Back in my college days I went through a couple semesters of Film & Video Studies classes (one of which was a course on documentary studies) and my younger brother is a budding film editor. To put it bluntly, I can smell a skunk a mile away, and my brother 10 miles given that he breathes film 24x7...
There's not a SINGLE edited frame in that movie (or REAL documentaries, for that matter) that is "unintentional", so for anyone to say that is a half-a$$ed copout by someone who knows NOTHING about film. I'll give the author kudo's for being creative in the way he glassed over and artfully dodged much of the accusations and outright BS that Moore apparently pulled, but it still doesn't change the fact that in places, it's a FABRICATED film. Documentaries aren't fabricated, they are built on a foundation of honest and direct filmmaking and editing, not editing to create or craft perceptions contrary to the reality it is supposed to show. I recall a number of PBS specials that were lambasted due to their fabrication and setups of animal behaviors and the like a number of years back. My memory is fuzzy, but I believe that it did ruin the careers of a couple of directors.
I could care less about the subject-matter, if one edits to CREATE something that didn't exist in the first place to sway opinion, that's NOT a documentary.
That's propaganda.
There's a pretty well-defined line between creative editing and outright fabrication. Forget the political/moral/social commentary and judge the work off of it's honesty, which has rightly been called into question in a number of places...
