He’s no Paris Hilton, but Michael Moore provided one of the more dramatic exchanges on Larry King Live in a while, having an on-air throwdown with CNN’s own medical correspondent (and TIME contributor) Dr. Sanjay Gupta last night. (Here’s the transcript, link courtesy of Romenesko; the video’s online at CNN.)
The confrontation followed a Gupta report on CNN that claimed to fact-check “fudgings” of facts in Sicko that compared the U.S. health-care system with other countries’ (though Gupta also generally endorsed the movie’s critique of the American system as broken). In a Monday interview on The Situation Room, Moore attacked Gupta’s report (not to mention whaling on Wolf Blitzer for the mainstream media’s coverage of Iraq), setting up the bizarre situation of a CNN correspondent engaging in a feisty, interruption-heavy argument on his own network’s air.
I haven’t yet seen Sicko, so I’m not going to referee the film’s merits. But the irony of Gupta’s original report is that, while Gupta accused Moore of “cherrypicking” facts, some of the points Gupta chooses to review seem like stretches in themselves. For instance, Gupta notes that while the U.S.’s health care system is ranked 37th in the world by the World Health Organization, the system in Cuba–where Moore brings American patients in a notorious scene from the movie–is ranked 39th.
OK. And? For the world’s remaining superpower to finish two places in front of a poor island nation… still a little bit of an indictment, no? And one of the arguments Gupta brought out on LKL–“You criticize the government so soundly. But you’re willing to hand over one of our most precious commodities, our health care in this country, to the government”–seems much more like a political argument than a fact-check.
Meanwhile, Gupta’s other charge against Moore–that he describes other countries’ systems as “free” when they’re in fact subsidized by taxes–may be an interesting philosophical point (“What is ‘free’?”), but it’s a pretty semantic quibble. Of course all health care has a price. Does anyone believe that the money for the French health care system is rooted up from the dirt of Perigord by trained truffle-hunting pigs?
It’s unfortunate, because there are probably more substantive, bigger-picture issues that Moore and someone like Gupta could be debating; toward the end of the LKL interview, for instance, they get into an exchange over the merits of universal coverage vs. longer wait times that might have been worthwile if they hadn’t run out of time. I’m not exactly a blind loyalist of Michael Moore’s, but it seems there’s plenty of cherrypicking to go around here.