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Michael Moore, role model: the lefty propagandist is almost as hypocritical as he is inane

MICHAEL MOORE is a one-man left-wing industry, churning out books, films, and speeches at an astonishing rate. Iraq, evil corporations, and racism all figure prominently in his message. But he is selling more than a few policy ideas. In fact, he advances an entire ethic: Reject capitalism, stay away from corporations, and thereby prove that you are neither racist nor an exploiter of the poor. Moore piously insists that we all measure ourselves by his yardstick. But what happens when we put that yardstick next to him?

One constant theme in Moore's books and films is that racism is rampant in America. He is quick to pull the trigger on those he thinks are insufficiently "inclusive." In Bowling for Columbine, he says that white Americans buy guns because of an irrational fear of black people--or, more precisely, because they hate integration, mixed relationships, and minorities in general. Supposedly, they also refuse to discuss racism and discrimination--which is why Moore, as America's racial conscience, must contrive an endless series of attention-getting stunts to dramatize these issues. In one episode of his television program TV Nation, for example, Moore had a reporter go to the beaches of largely white Greenwich, Conn., and bring along some black friends. (Curiously, they were not lynched.)

Moore relentlessly attacks those who fail to meet his standards of racial fairness and equality. American journalists--only 5 percent of whom are black--are one target. "At work," Moore proclaims, "we whites still get the plum jobs, double the pay, and a seat in the front of the bus to happiness and success." Hollywood is another favorite target, for not having enough blacks in senior positions. "I now play a game with myself," he writes in Stupid White Men, "trying to clock how long it will be before I spot a black man or woman who isn't wearing a uniform or sitting at a receptionist's desk.... During my last three trips to Los Angeles the clock never stopped: the black head count was zero."

In 1998 Moore proposed what he called a "very strong affirmative action policy" involving mandatory quotas, and in Stupid White Men he encourages minorities to contact him about jobs on his projects. Pointing his finger at the rest of us, he sermonizes: "If you're white and you really want to help change things why not start with yourself?" I decided to find out how well Moore has followed his own advice. How large is the "black head count" in his films?

First I checked the credits of his latest film, Fahrenheit 9/11, and researched the backgrounds of its crew members. Of Fahrenheit's senior crew--fourteen producers, three editors, a production manager, and a production coordinator--all 19 were white. So were all three cameramen and the two composers of original music.

A Moore fan might suppose that this is some sort of anomaly. In fact, of the 134 producers, editors, cinematographers, composers, and production coordinators Moore has hired for his major television and film projects, only three were black. (He did hire one white producer who majored in African-American Studies. Perhaps that counts.) For those who care to keep track, Moore comes in well below the 5 percent figure in journalism that troubles him so.

When not denouncing Americans' failure to hire more blacks, Moore points an accusatory finger at "white flight" and de facto segregation as evidence of our society's racism. Americans might be "magnanimous enough to say, 'Sure you can even live here in our neighborhood; your kids can go to our kids' school. Why the hell not? We were just leaving anyway,'" he writes in Stupid White Men. Americans "gave black America a pat on the back--and then ran like the devil to the suburbs." (He neglects to mention that middle-class blacks have done precisely the same thing.)

Moore wrote those words from the comfort of his beautiful home in Central Lake, Mich.--a community of some 2,300 people that, according to the 2000 census, does not have a single black resident.

LIVIN' THE LIFE

Like his intellectual godfather Noam Chomsky, Moore finds few things more evil than American corporations. He has spent most of his life trashing them, starting with Roger and Me, a skewering of General Motors. In The Big One, he took on Hershey and Nike. Violent crime in America is a product of the gun industry, he claimed in Bowling for Columbine. Oil companies loom large in Fahrenheit 9/11. On his television programs TV Nation and The Awful Truth, he attacked HMOs and criticized defense contractors as part of the military-industrial complex. In his forthcoming film Sicko, he accuses pharmaceutical companies and HMOs of letting Americans die to boost their profits. "We need protection from our own multimillionaire corporate terrorists, the ones who rip off our old-age pensions, destroy the environment, deplete irreplaceable fossil fuels in the name of profit, deny us our right to universal health care, take peoples' jobs away whenever the mood hits them," Moore warns in Dude, Where's My Country? Halliburton is particularly vile, run as it is by a bunch of "thugs." Moore once told an audience in Great Britain, "I would just like to make a modest proposal: From now on, for every Brit or American kid that's killed in this war, I would like Halliburton to slay one mid-level executive."

Because corporations are so evil, Moore would have us maintain our purity by keeping out of the stock market. Making money in the stock market means getting "rich by throwing people out of work, exploiting children and the poor in other countries," he writes in Stupid White Men. "Ah, money. The sweet stench of success. A couple of years ago I was talking to a guy in a bar who happened to be a stockbroker. He asked me about my 'investments.' I told him I didn't have any, that I don't own a single share of stock. He was stunned. 'You mean you don't have a portfolio where you keep your money?' 'I don't think it's a good idea to keep your money in portfolios,' I replied, 'or in a briefcase, or even under the futon. I save what little I can in a place called a 'bank,' where I have what the old-timers call a 'savings account.'" Moore repeated this claim in a 1997 letter to the online magazine Salon, saying, "I don't own any stock." His advice to other Americans is to stay out of the market. "It's Vegas," he told Brian Lamb on C-SPAN's Booknotes. "That's the rich man's game."

Although Moore publicly claims that he doesn't invest in the stock market, he privately tells the IRS something completely different. Moore and his wife, Kathleen Glynn, have a private foundation that they established shortly after he started making serious money from Roger and Me. They donate funds to the foundation tax free, decide how the funds are invested, and donate profits to any cause they see fit. Moore and his wife have complete control over the foundation's assets; there is no outside manager or trustee. The foundation's registered address is their home in Michigan, and Michael Moore signs the IRS forms himself.

The year Moore claimed in Stupid White Men that he didn't own any stock, he reported to the IRS that his foundation held more than $280,000 in corporate stock and close to $100,000 in corporate bonds. The IRS forms should be interesting reading for anyone acquainted with Moore's documentaries. Over the past five years, Moore's portfolio included such evil pharmaceutical and medical companies as Pfizer, Merck, Genzyme, Elan, Eli Lilly, BD, and Boston Scientific. "Being screwed by your HMO and ill served by pharmaceutical companies is a shared American experience," he recently told the Los Angeles Times. "The system, inferior to that of much poorer nations, benefits the few at the expense of the many." Count Moore as one of the few.

Moore has also invested in energy giants like Noble Energy, Schlumberger, Williams Companies, Transocean Sedco Forex, and Anadarko, all firms that "deplete irreplaceable fossil fuels in the name of profit," as Moore puts it in Dude, Where's My Country?

Moore is loud in his support of labor unions and has attacked Nike for hiring "underpaid" Third World workers, but it's striking how few of the companies in which he has invested have unions themselves. Most of them are high-tech firms that outsource production to China, or major oil conglomerates that do business in the developing world. I couldn't find a single investment that involved a heavily unionized company.

Perhaps the ultimate irony is that Moore has owned shares in that symbol of evil incarnate, Halliburton--an investment on which he made a 15 percent profit, according to IRS filings.

THE PHILANTHROPIST

Moore also misrepresents the work his foundation does. In his Booknotes interview, he said, "We have a foundation that we've set up, where we help out a lot of first-time filmmakers. We also fund a lot of things in the Flint area and a lot of social-action groups and things like that." He also told The New Yorker that his foundation funds "first-time filmmakers, battered women's shelters, and soup kitchens, among other things."

Once again, his filings with the IRS tell a different story. Yes, there were a few modest grants to programs helping the poor--but nothing on the scale he suggests. In fact, Moore usually donates just enough to maintain his foundation's charitable status. A 2002 estimate put Moore's net worth in the eight figures, yet his foundation gave away a meager $36,000 that year. In 2000, he gave away only $22,000.

Moore also has a knack for giving money to friends who do favors for him. In 2000, $4,500 went to that most proletarian of organizations, the Film Society of Lincoln Center in New York, and another $1,000 went to the Ann Arbor Film Festival--both of which later held lavish events promoting Bowling for Columbine. The next year he gave $2,500 to Pamela Yates, who was a producer for his NBC program TV Nation; he also made a grant to his friend Jeff Gibbs, who provided the music for Bowling for Columbine and helped Moore write some of his books. Moore has given money to the New York Video Festival, which held events promoting TV Nation. And in 2002, $25,000 went to the American Library Association, whose members Moore credits with getting HarperCollins to reconsider its decision to cancel his anti-Bush screed Stupid White Men after 9/11.

That someone hires few black employees, or invests in corporations, or fails to donate large amounts of his income to charity is not in itself a reason to condemn him. Michael Moore is simply wrong when he claims that American society is characterized by pervasive discrimination or that corporations are innately evil. Yet Moore's staggering hypocrisy makes it difficult to think that he even believes what he is saying. Publicly, Moore styles himself a populist crusader who champions the causes of workers, women, minorities, the environment--in short, all of capitalism's supposed discontents. Privately, Moore embodies his own caricature of capitalism. In the words of Douglas Urbanski, his former manager: "He is more money-obsessed than anyone I have known. And that's saying a lot."

Mr. Schweizer, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, is the author of the just-released Do As I Say (Not As I Do): Profiles in Liberal Hypocrisy(Doubleday), from which this article is adapted.

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