Headline News

Not satisfied with inventing political advertisements that didn’t exist in Bowling for Columbine, Mikey is now inventing newspaper headlines, reports the Bloomington Pantagraph.

So you’re in the theater, watching “Fahrenheit 9/11” as the movie flashes photos of big newspaper headlines ...

The Washington Post.

The St. Petersburg Times.

The Bloomington, IL, Pantagraph.

Uh, the Bloomington Pantagraph? In the smash Michael Moore flick?

One word: Yup.

“It’s definitely The Pantagraph,” says Dawn Riordan at The Normal Theater where she and her husband, Cliff Carney, have viewed the shot so many times, they’ve written down the Pantagraph headline featured in the movie ("LATEST FLORIDA RECOUNT SHOWS GORE WON ELECTION") and the date of the edition it allegedly appeared—Wed., Dec. 11, 2001.

One problem:

We went through the entire Wed., Dec. 11, 2001 edition of this newspaper—and there’s no such headline.

A call to Michael Moore’s film company remains unanswered.

As for those alleged “factual” question marks in the otherwise great movie: Now apparently, you can even add this newspaper to the list.

The only conclusive fact in any Michael Moore project is that he will lie at any possible opportunity.

Update by JimK: Here’s a screen grab from the best copy of F911 floating around. 

It’s still hard to see the date, but it damn sure isn’t Dec. 5th.  It’s clearly the 10th or later.  And that is vital to the timing of the claim Moore is making in the film.  So what we have here is a paper/magazine that published an article that was referencing an earlier recount, and Moore fudged the date in order to make the article support his claims.

That’s just shameful.

Update 2 by JimK - So I screwed something up myself.  In my focus on the date of the 5th or the 11th, I did not notice at all that everyone, Moore, the paper, the image I was staring at, said 2001!  So ignore my rumblings about the date having a meaning germane to the subject of the segment.  But now I’m left with even more confusion.  Just why the hell did Moore do this?  It makes absolutely no sense, but here it is, in black & white so to speak.  He lied.  To what end I have no idea.