U.S. diplomats concocted lie that Michael Moore's "Sicko" was banned in Cuba

I was happy to see Michael Moore offer $20k toward's JA's bail.

I think that propagandists on the right realize that the left and Cubans would know it's a lie. But the bigoted right wing support base would likely believe any offhand disinformation as true as well as many comprising the soft liberal middle who might not otherwise question the propaganda. All in all it adds up to very many people who are not able to discern between the truth and right wing propaganda. All in all it's cheap and effective propaganda for the right and especially when 90 some-odd percent of the broadcast and paper news media in that country are owned by the billionaire oligarchy. They are safe to say anything and especially when the majority of information sources are under their control and influence.

Yeah, we all know.  Cuba's [url=http://therealcuba.com/kubaa463.jpg]wonderful[/url] and Michael Moore wouldn't lie about [url=http://archive.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2005/11/3/150518.shtml]anyt... (unless it suited him).

So can someone tell me why his story is any more believable than the official one?

If he prefers being lied to on a constant basis, it's his choice. It's all about choices.

abnormal wrote:

Yeah, we all know.  Cuba's [url=http://therealcuba.com/kubaa463.jpg]wonderful[/url] and Michael Moore wouldn't lie about [url=http://archive.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2005/11/3/150518.shtml]anyt... (unless it suited him).

 

So can someone tell me why his story is any more believable than the official one?

Now, here's why I despair of people ever waking up sufficiently to govern themselves.

Think about it for five seconds.
For many, including much of the media, it is like abnormal's (all too normalized) "he said, she said"
finally boiling down to who you like/dislike the most.

One does not have to like Michael Moore, or believe everything he says (I certainly don't) to look at this thing with a modicum of rationality.
Moore's claim, for xxxx sake, is that the movie was broadcast on NATIONAL CUBAN TV. Hello, how hard can that be to fact check???

Never mind, the "he said" (Moore) does some of the apparently onerous work for you.
It is prefaced by this entirely justified statement:

Quote:

And not one scintilla of digging to see if Cuba had actually banned the movie! In fact, just the opposite. The right wing press started to have a field day reporting a lie (Andy Levy of Fox -- twice -- Reason Magazine, Spectator and Hot Air, plus a slew of blogs). Sadly, even BoingBoing and my friends at the Nation wrote about it without skepticism. So here you have WikiLeaks, who have put themselves on the line to find and release these cables to the press -- and traditional journalists are once again just too lazy to lift a finger, point and click their mouse to log into Nexis or search via Google, and look to see if Cuba really did "ban the film." Had just ONE reporter done that, here's they would have found:

[followed by documentary evidence including cached Cuban articles on the movie]

http://www.michaelmoore.com/words/mike-friends-blog/viva-wikileaks

For an addendum to this we have the Guardian itself.
To it's credit, it published the article Unionist first posted, and yet the original false, hook, line and sinker story still stands with only this "correction" added at the bottom

Quote:

* On his website today Michael Moore has said that Cuba did not ban his documentary, Sicko

This, of course, is NOT a "correction," but another "he said, she said" cover despite the undeniable, easily demonstrable factually false original story.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/dec/17/wikileaks-cuba-banned-sicko

Any follower of Glenn Greenwald will know that the Guardian's cover-your-ass slight of hand is not unique and neither is my complaint regarding the media's various "guardian's of truth", in Greenwald's case, it's Time magazine and different lies:

Quote:

Friday, Dec 10, 2010 09:43 ET
The media's authoritarianism and WikiLeaks
By Glenn Greenwald

(updated below - Update II - Update III)

After I highlighted the multiple factual inaccuracies in Time's WikiLeaks article yesterday (see Update V) -- and then had an email exchange with its author, Michael Lindenberger -- the magazine has now appended to the article what it is calling a "correction."  In reality, the "correction" is nothing of the sort; it is instead a monument to the corrupted premise at the heart of American journalism....

In other words, the most Time is willing to do -- when forced by public complaints -- is note that "some" people (i.e., Assange) "dispute" the Government's accusatory claims of "indiscriminate" document dumping, ones uncritically amplified by Time and countless other media outlets.  The most they're willing to do now is convert it into a "they-said/he-said" dispute.  But what they won't do -- under any circumstances -- is state clearly that the Government's accusations are false, even where, as here, they unquestionably are....

Since the time I posted, the Guardian seems to have pulled its original "Cuba banned Sicko" page (no connection between the two, of course,  but a tiny victory for truth--or embarrassment--nonetheless).