Earlier this month, I interviewed Oscar-winning filmmaker and political commentator Michael Moore about Wikileaks.
It was the day after he'd pledged $20,000 to help free the embattled Wikileaks chief, Julian Assange, on bail.
The resulting 3,000-word interview is a look at Wikileaks, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, national security, the definition of journalism, Bank of America, the housing crisis, the rape allegations against Assange, the Nuremberg trials and transparency in our government, among other things.
The unbridled ranting that has become synonymous with Moore's name is met with my own efforts to ask him questions that would provoke less of his trademark reactionary spew and more of his razor sharp perceptions. When it comes to interviews, Moore is a first-rate conversationalist. Taking none of his alleged "facts" at face value, I checked them all — they were rock solid.
I sliced the interview into segments and began a 72-hour attempt to place the first installment of the freelance piece.
The New York Times responded with an email that remarked on my protocol. Although they post submission guidelines on their website and indicate generic email addresses for relevant departments (i.e. foreign@nytimes.com, national@nytimes.com, managing-editor@nytimes.com, etc.), and although I followed those guidelines and queried several editors, the single staff editor who responded to my follow-up email never remarked on the query itself but, instead, told me I would have to resubmit the query to "a specific, named editor".
Clearly, the editor who'd responded was not going to reroute my query internally. The news giant was busy dealing with other Wikileaks matters that day, like the US Air Force decision to ban The New York Times due to its role in reposting the Wikileaks leaks.
The Huffington Post turned it down, most understandably, because Michael Moore already has a blog on their site.
The Los Angeles Times never responded to me; they were in the midst of uploading a vitriolic piece on Michael Moore entitled, "Paging Osama Bin Laden: Michael Moore embraces the Wikileaks controversy".
Reuters rejected the piece as being too soft and opinionated. In their view, experts like constitutional lawyers should weigh in on the matter. Not filmmakers.
What say you? Should experts own this conversation? Didn't government experts authorize the spending of billions and billions of dollars in taxpayer subsidized bail-outs to remedy atrocious corporate mismanagement by highly educated experts?
Whether it's a seasoned politician, a union leader or a blogger, whenever a candidate, agitator or commentator steps out onto the world stage and tells us to Wake up!, it's an abrasion. The kind of radical change that they're espousing — embrace transparency, embrace accountability! — is not only unsettling, it's a finger in the face. And most of us don't like being told what to do. So if they tell us what to do, we will at least expect them to do it with style, no? A measured tone and a good facial can go a long way.
