So you know how yesterday I posted about Michael Moore’s appearance on CNN, and my basic take was, “Michael Moore’s just looking for attention/I don’t think the Gupta piece was that bad”? Well, yesterday afternoon, Gupta admitted to getting one fact wrong in his piece: he misquoted a number used by Moore in Sicko in regards to per capita health care spending in Cuba. Later, Gupta appeared on Larry King Live opposite Moore. The first of three parts of that segment is embedded below.

In this segment, Moore says his people spoke with Gupta’s people on June 29th about inaccuracies in the piece; The Huffington Post posted email evidence of that conversation shortly before Larry King Live last night.

Was it irresponsible for CNN to re-run a clip that they knew contained inaccuracies? Sure. But post-CNN apology, what is Moore trying to achieve by continuing to beat this dead horse? It seems to all boil down to an issue of linguistics: Moore is upset because Gupta’s piece said he “fudged facts.” In reality, Moore probably didn’t really “fudge” as much as selectively included statistics that bolstered his argument, and omitted facts that contradict or confuse his stance on the issues. CNN isn’t guilty of libel, per se; can you sue a TV network for an imprecisely worded voiceover?

Bloggers have almost unanimously*** taken the filmmaker’s side. “[N]o nonfiction filmmaker is scrutinized in the way that Moore is. Hell, no journalist is scrutinized the way Moore is (oh, but if they were),” writes A.J. Schnack. “If [Moore's] right about nothing else (and even if his appearance last night bordered on the wild-eyed, which I’m not saying it did), CNN has plenty to answer for.” Rachel Sklar is more blunt: “Does it compromise my journalistic objectivity to say that Dr. Sanjay Gupta is a dick?”

At this point, it seems as though CNN is just embarrassing themselves by letting Moore and Gupta argue in circles. It’s easy to peg Moore as the winner in all this–not only does he get the satisfaction of having made a major news organization look bad, but he gets hours worth of free publicity for his film–but the flip side to Moore\’s triumph is the agony that is watching CNN dig their own grave.

**UPDATE: It’s not all sunny skies in the blogosphere for Mr. Moore. When forced to choose which of the two great Satans to side with between CNN and Michael Moore, conservative bloggers are showing a surprising surfeit of sympathy for the cable news giant. “While I can agree that our media establishment does not always serve the public interest well, listening to Michael Moore rant and rave about them is rich,” writes Pam Meister. Allahpundit calls Moore a racist and accuses him of beating on an easy target; Libertas also plays the “Mike’s a bully” card–”For Moore to get in a battle of wits with Wolf Blitzer of all people

Everyone’s talking this morning about this crazy segment on CNN last night. Wolf Blitzer ran a pre-recorded segment, produced by their medical correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta, questioning some of the facts about international health care in Sicko. Michael Moore then went on a ten-minute rant, accusing CNN of treating him unfairly, producing biased reporting to please their sponsors, and lying to the American people.

Gupta isn’t exactly saying that Sicko is a ball of lies; he’s mostly focused on the facts the film fails to reveal. The basic crux of his argument is this: “It’s true, the United States is the only country in the Western world without free, universal access to health care. But, you won’t find medical utopia elsewhere.” Gupta even closes his segment with something resembling an olive branch: “No matter how much Moore fudged the facts–and he did fudge some facts–there’s one everyone agrees on: the system here should be far better.”

This just seems like common sense to me–as in, anyone with a brain who watches Sicko understands that there is a give-and-take in other countries, a not-so-swell side of universal health care that Moore declines to show in order to bolster his argument.

But Moore, apparently on a mission to become a parody of himself, is no longer willing to accept even a shred of criticism. When in doubt, he always pulls the “poor little Mike versus the big bad mainstream media companies” card. He criticizes CNN for running pharmaceutical ads, but as Blitzer points out, you don’t see him demanding that Harvey Weinstein pull all Sicko ads from CNN.

The clip embedded above closes with Lou Dobbs laughing off Moore as “more of a left-wing promoter than Hugo Chavez”, but oddly, Moore actually spends the majority of his CNN screen time deflecting attention away from his film. I guess he figures there’s more long-term value in turning the appearance into a stunt, demanding that Blitzer and CNN “apologize to the American people” for their failure to ask the proper questions about the war in Iraq, and even slamming Gupta in particular for embedding with the troops and not coming back with a scathing report (according to Blitzer, Gupta was too busy performing neurosurgery on injured soldiers to do much negative reporting).

Moore has a point-by-point rebuttal of Gupta’s piece posted on his own site. It’s not exactly a gleeful “smackdown”–the general tone is, “Gupta’s truth is sort of true, but it’s not the whole truth.” Nonetheless, he’s still demanding an apology from CNN, and, according to BoingBoing, asking that his fans do the same.

UPDATE: According to FishbowlNY, Michael Moore will be back on CNN tonight, “debating” Sanjay Gupta face-to-face. Fishbowl also confirms that I’m not crazy, and that Moore did seem to put a very strange spin on his enunciation of Gupta’s last name–they refer to it as “the Kwik-E-Mart pronunciation.”

For the second week in a row, it’s looking like Michael Moore is on track to be the most written-about filmmaker in America. Here’s a brief sampling of the portly provocateur’s latest tour through mass culture:

***Moore is not quoted in but still seems to haunt a lengthy FORTUNE piece on the troubles of Sicko producer Harvey Weinstein. “If [Moore's] film is wildly successful, it could mark a turning point for the Weinstein Co., so Harvey can be forgiven for playing the controversy-equals-marketing strategy he mastered at Miramax,” writes Tim Arango.

***Arango, who pegs Sicko’s budget at $9 million, says the doc has to gross $20 million domestically to hit expectations. According to Variety, it’s well on its way to satisfactory: the flick made $70,000 on one screen this weekend, via three days worth of sold out shows.

***At least two of those sold-out shows were attended by Moore himself. According to the New York Observer, Moore introed the 11pm show by reminding the audience, “We live in dark times…A little laughter sometimes helps.

No contemporary documentary director has as recognizable a formula as Michael Moore. Pick an issue, find a few sympathetic folks to tell tear jerking stories related to said issue; pick a boogeyman to shoulder the blame for the subject’s tears, and then hunt down that boogeyman and force him (I *think* it’s always been a him) to confront his own culpability. That’s the ultimate moment of a Michael Moore film, right? The part where the populist warrior confronts his ideological enemy (or, at the very least, a symbol of his ideological enemy) and either reduces him to a simpering idiot, or gets the camera crew forcibly ejected from the building?

At first, Sicko comes off as the ultimate distillation of the Michael Moore formula. At times the filmmaker even seems to be pushing his “regular dude” persona into the territory of self-parody. The New York Times‘ A.O. Scott notes the “theatrical faux-na

Michael Moore’s most recent documentary, Sicko, will premiere this Saturday at the Cannes Film Festival, and is scheduled for US release by Lionsgate on June 29. And suddenly, as if perfectly timed by the Weinstein Co. rather than the U.S. Treasury, Moore is being investigated for possibly violating America’s trade embargo with Cuba by going to the “forbidden” country to make a portion of his film. Cuba is even saying that Moore is a victim of censorship (read about it here). It doesn’t get much juicier than that.

In The Hollywood Reporter’s piece on the matter, “Healthy debate surrounds Moore’s docu ‘Sicko,’” has this to say about the publicity stunt:

Lionsgate and the Weinstein Co. are making the Treasury Department’s investigation a key focus of their “Sicko” campaign. The Weinstein Co. has hired David Boies, the chief attorney in Al Gore’s recount battle against George Bush in the 2000 U.S. presidential election, to help on the “Sicko” case. Chris Lehane, a political consultant on the film, said in an interview that TWC and Lionsgate would “go to the mattresses for this film and fight the Bush efforts in every way possible.”

On the anti-Moore side, News Corp. properties Fox News and the New York Post have run editorials and commentaries slamming the filmmaker.

While the Treasury Dept. triggered the current contretemps, “It’s Harvey (Weinstein) up to his old tricks, doing his Barnum & Bailey act,” said one prominent studio marketing executive. “It’s a textbook ‘create a controversy’ to rev up all the people who hate the government and bring attention to the movie, which is what film marketing is all about. A-plus to them.”

The funny thing is that, according to a press release about the film’s release date, Harvey Weinstein sees Sicko as “less controversial” than Fahrenheit 9-11.

“I’ve seen this movie with Republicans and Democrats, and this is one time Michael has sort of unified everyone,” [Weinstein] said. “The health care industry might not have a very good July Fourth.”

Here’s to so-called unification. We’ll have to see how that works out.