Last week, I posted this item (go to the earlier post to see the links):
I’ve had the nastygram sent by the Pantagraph to Michael Moore, complaining about Moore’s alleged partial fictionalization of a Pantagraph headline put up here. (The page will disappear soon, so you might want to avoid linking directly to that page; before that happens, I’ll copy it to a permanent home and update this post accordingly, but I’m on the road now and can’t do that.)
Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 apparently portrayed the Pantagraph as saying, in a large headline accompanying a Dec. 19, 2001 news story, “LATEST FLORIDA RECOUNT SHOWS GORE WON ELECTION”; the Pantagraph says that this was a caption accompanying a Dec. 5, 2001 letter to the editor, and thus just the newspaper’s summary of what the letter was saying, rather than the newspaper’s characterization of the actual news. . . .
Moore’s lawyers have apparently now responded; I haven’t seen a copy of their letter, but here’s the excerpt from the Pantagraph‘s latest article on this:
New York-based lawyer Devereux Chatillon of the law firm Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal sent the letter to J. Casey Costigan, the Bloomington attorney representing the newspaper. . . .
[T]he letter claims Moore did nothing “misleading” when the headline (“Latest Florida recount shows Gore won election”) that originally appeared above a Dec. 5, 2001, letter to the editor was altered in both the font and size of the type for the movie and made to look like a news story from a Dec. 19, 2001, edition of The Pantagraph. . . .
Hmm — seems to me that quoting a headline to a letter to the editor without making it clear that it came from the letter-writer is indeed misleading; the reasonable viewer would assume that the newspaper is endorsing the assertion, rather than simply characterizing it. I can certainly see why a lawyer contemplating litigation would refuse to make such a concession; but it seems to me that self-described documentary creators should be held to a somewhat different standard.
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