Excellent Piece On Moore v. Liar Gupta

http://www.bestcyrano.org/THOMASPAINE/?p=148

Really superb, goes through the entire scummy hit piece point by point - both the facts (or lies), and the disturbing rhetorical devices used to deliver the payload of bovine excreta... excerpts below:

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Michael Moore recently went head-to-head with Dr. Sanjay Gupta, CNN’s chief medical correspondent, over a short, pseudo-journalistic hit-piece crafted by the latter in which Moore is charged with “fudging the facts” in Sicko, his new film about the woeful inadequacy of American health care. Their heated debate on Larry King Live provided little illumination, as both quibbled over figures and source citations. Moore did his best, over the course of five minutes, to refute what amounted to a cheap, underhanded assault on his journalistic credibility, but viewers could easily have come away from the exchange with little appreciation for just how sleazy and manipulative Dr. Gupta’s attack on Moore actually was.

What we never got to see was the much-needed debunking of Gupta’s piece, which was essentially a series of astonishing non sequiturs unified only by an emotional arc of patronizing cautionary tones. Judging from the strategy taken in this piece - very much in line with what I’ve seen elsewhere this past week in The New York Times and other publications known for their elitist air of dignified skepticism - the corporate media’s spin-strategy regarding Sicko is going to be to 1) admit that the most damning facts are true, and 2) convince the public that the price of correcting them is more than we as Americans would want to pay.

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But Dr. Gupta’s piece only goes from bad to worse on the subject of patient wait- times. Dr. Gupta mentions “non-emergency elective surgery,” in which “a study” reveals that Americans have the next-to-least wait time after Germany. He gives no comparative figures (i.e. what is the difference between best and worst - a wide spread or a marginal one?) and also fails to explain why Germany’s universal coverage bests the U.S. “That’s not something you’ll see in Sicko,” Dr. Gupta admonishes, referring America’s alleged wait-time superiority, “as Americans talk about their lack of coverage, and suffocating red tape.” This is truly a dirty tactic. The phrase “non-emergency elective surgery” goes by in a rush, and, juxtaposed as it is against the phrase “That’s not something you’ll see…” it implies again that Moore has left a crucial flaw in the universal health care systems of other countries out of the picture altogether.

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But here comes the ultimate humdinger; a trick of editing that is downright diabolical. Dr. Gupta intones: “But in Canada, you can be waiting for a long time. A survey of six industrialized nations found that only Canada was worse than the U.S. when it came to waiting for a doctors appointment for a medical problem.”