Right Wing Nut House

In another excellent installment from Byron York’s “The Vast Left Wing Conspiracy,” (A book I’m awaiting anxiously to arrive) the author explodes the myth of popularity that surrounds Michael Moore’s excreable piece of propaganda “Farenheit 9/11.”

It’s a telling tale of what happens when the Hollywood Hype machine matches up with the liberal megaphones of the mainstream press. And the result was a fiction that could have tipped the election in favor of Kerry.

Using data supplied by a Hollywood insider, York shows how the pronouncements of Moore and his partisans of the film’s acceptance in “red state” theaters was a lie, that the film actually underperformed spectacularly in many key markets.

This didn’t stop the mainstream press from gleefully repeating the falsehoods and hype that Moore and his ideological friends were spouting to the public:

Press accounts added to the idea that Fahrenheit 9/11 was winning over Bush supporters. The day before Moore spoke to MoveOn, the Los Angeles Times ran a story headlined “‘Fahrenheit’ Is Casting a Wide Net at Theaters: Anti-Bush Sentiment Runs High at Showings of the Documentary, Which Has Opened with a Strong Box-Office from 868 Screens.” The story began with a woman, a supporter of the president, who had gotten into stinging political arguments with her anti-Bush college student son. The son urged her to see Fahrenheit 9/11, and she emerged from the movie with tears in her eyes. “My emotions are just…,” she said, unable to continue. “I feel like we haven’t seen the whole truth before.” The Times wrote of another man, a well-to-do retired insurance agent, who described himself as a lifelong Republican but who, after seeing the movie, vowed to leave the GOP. “I won’t be voting for a Republican presidential candidate this time,” he told the Times.

The liberals in the press have honed this tactic of singling out one person to try and show that such sentiment is widespread to perfection. Witness just about any economic or health care story on the news and you’ll see some poor schlub who blames the President for the trying circumstances in which they find themselves. Conversely, try and remember how many “feel-good” economic stories there were during the Clinton administration. I can remember quite a few.

Even Time Magazine took Moore’s bait and started hyping the film’s potential impact on the election:

Summing up the emerging conventional wisdom, Time magazine wrote, “You would have expected Moore’s movie to play well in the liberal big cities, and it is doing so. But the film is also touching the heart of the heartland. In Bartlett, Tenn., a Memphis suburb, the rooms at Stage Road Cinema showing Fahrenheit 9/11 have been packed with viewers who clap, boo, laugh and cry nearly on cue. Even the dissenters are impressed. When the lights came up after a showing last week, one gent rose from his seat and said grudgingly, ‘It’s bulls**t, but I gotta admit it was done well.’” Calling Fahrenheit 9/11 “a shaping force in the presidential campaign,” Time wrote that the film was attracting “the curious, the hostile, the indifferent. . . . [Moore is] doing what he does best — pestering — to get them into theaters. And then to the polls.”

Moore, who bragged that the film “sold out” in Fayetteville, North Carolina (home of Fort Bragg) and they had “standing ovation” in Greensboro, NC was whistling past the graveyard. Here are some real numbers that Fat Mickey doesn’t want you to see:

Fahrenheit 9/11 also did well in Seattle, Montreal, Ottawa, Portland, Oregon, Monterey, California, and Burlington, Vermont. In all, two things stand out from those numbers. One is that the picture overperformed only in blue states, and even then only in the most urban parts of those blue states. And the second is that it did very well in Canada. Fahrenheit 9/11 consistently overperformed in Canadian cities; without that boffo business, the film’s gross would have been significantly smaller than it was.

That’s the upside of the story. The downside revealed by the Nielsen EDI numbers is that Fahrenheit 9/11, far from being the runaway nationwide hit that Moore claimed, underperformed in dozens of markets throughout red states and, most important — as far as the presidential election was concerned — swing states. Dallas/Fort Worth, the ninth-largest movie market, accounts for 2.07 percent of North American box office but made up just 1.21 percent of Fahrenheit 9/11 box office, for an underperformance of nearly 42 percent. In Phoenix, the tenth-largest market, Fahrenheit 9/11 underperformed by 29 percent. In Houston, ranked twelfth for movies, it underperformed by 38 percent. In Orlando, it underperformed by 38 percent; Tampa-St. Petersburg, by 41 percent; Salt Lake City, by 61 percent.

The list goes on for quite a while: Las Vegas, Raleigh-Durham, San Antonio, Norfolk, Charlotte, Nashville, Memphis, Jacksonville, Flint, Michigan (Michael Moore’s home turf), and many others. And in Fayetteville and Tulsa, where Moore boasted that his movie had sold out, Fahrenheit 9/11 underperformed by 41 percent and 50 percent, respectively

Note: When York writes of the film “underperforming” he means that the fim’s gross underperformed in relation to the total share of Hollywood’s take on a city by city basis. So that if a movie does spectacularly in blue states, overperforming by 50% or more, it could still do very poorly in red states as it underperforms by the same amount.

What these numbers show is that Moore and his allies in the media were trying to weave a narrative in which the “truth” in 9/11 was changing people’s minds about the President and the war and that this story would in fact swing the election. In the end, as with Michael Moore himself, the stories were proved to be full of hot air.