Liberal Documentaries: Attacking the Messenger Instead of the Message

Sicko has finally made it a few American theaters and it is time once against for conservative film critics to attack not the message, but the messenger. Just as with An Inconvenient Truth and Fahrenheit 911 those who don't like what the film has to say engage in the tactic of avoiding a dialogue with the issues, choosing instead the much easier route of impugning the filmmakers. The politicizing of cinematic aesthetics is illustrated by a criticism of An Inconvenient Truth that is all too typical. "In the end, the film loses its credibility by resorting to ever more frightening and unlikely scenarios designed to galvanize the audience into action. But this is in keeping, in a sense, with Al Gore, the man who [said]'During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet.' He might have been involved with some legislation that affected the development of the Internet, but he certainly didn't create it." That is from a review of An Inconvenient Truth by Dennis Behreandt in The New American. Rather than confronting the claims Al Gore makes about global warming in the film and systematically challenging them, the reviewer resorts to introducing an oft-misinterpreted statement made by Al Gore that is utterly irrelevant to the subject of global warming. Even worse, Behreandt confuses the evidence in the film as being attributed to Al Gore rather the hundreds of scientists who data Gore is relying upon. If this were ancient Rome and George W. Bush was the emperor he thinks he instead of just a President, Al Gore would have been killed for being the bearer of bad news.