Michael Moore

Yes, the corporate press was smug, hubristic, and often hilariously wrong.

I think the best journalism came from people outside the normal news.

Here are three nontraditional journalists who did excellent work:

--

Nate Silver did the best math.

His final election prediction is like a crash course in data science. Humble, thorough, quantifies uncertainty, acknowledges that errors may correlate. Explained in plain English and illustrated in a way that would make Edward Tufte proud. He lays out three scenarios (polling average accurate, 3-point error for Clinton, 3-point error for Trump). The latter describes in detail pretty much exactly what ended up happening.

http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/final-election-update-theres-a-wide-range-of-outcomes-and-most-of-them-come-up-clinton/

--

Chris Arnade got the best stories.

He's a former bond trader who now travels the country as a photojournalist, befriending and talking to all kinds of people, mostly working-class and poor.

Here's his best work, in my opinion: https://medium.com/@Chris_arnade/divided-by-meaning-1ab510759ee7

It was the first thing that really helped me understand Trump voters.

--

Finally, Michael Moore nailed it.

Months ago, he wrote an essay called Why Trump Will Win, asking his liberal audience to campaign hard and not get complacent.

http://michaelmoore.com/trumpwillwin/

It came true pretty much exactly as written.

One of his speeches was taken out of context and edited down into an…

Michael Moore nailed it: it's a rust belt brexit [1]. Four blue states in the Great Lakes rust belt -- MI, OH, PA, and WI -- all typically blue, all appear to have voted for Trump.

Since I'm from that area, what Moore points out and the free traders refuse to acknowledge is free trade has been absolutely devastating to the region. Sure, maybe you can buy cheap appliances that don't last that long anyway. But all the GM workers and steel workers and so forth are just SOL and education doesn't do a damn thing for them. They're not going to be making iphone apps (not that apps are all that lucrative anyway).

Economists / policymakers have lied to us; there's few benefits to globalization and there's a total lack of a meaningful employment policy to replace lost jobs with jobs of equal quality. But hey, Walmart may be hiring! And we wonder why people who worked in manufacturing, at Carrier [2], or at Oreo [3], aren't enthusiastic about free trade or its promoters.

[1] http://michaelmoore.com/trumpwillwin/

[2] http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/news/a44548/indiana-factory-outsourcing-manufacturing/

[3] http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/commentary/ct-oreos-nabisco-nafta-tpp-mondelez-perspec-0330-20160329-story.html

There's no "story," this is a post-mortem. She lost, we get to figure out why. That takes a bit of humility.

My lasting impression here was that the DNC's goal was not to win the presidency, it was to get Hillary Clinton elected to the presidency. There's a difference, and in this case, it was a vital one. During the Democratic caucuses I watched a lot of people vote for Hillary because it was assumed "she has the best chance of beating Trump." But the numbers at the time didn't even bear it out, and here we are.

What bit the DNC in the ass in a big way last night was that they completely miscalculated the importance of a large portion of the electorate that Trump actively courted, nominated a candidate that had almost no chance of swaying these voters, and ignored and denigrated them for the entire campaign. Whoops. Calling this a 'blind spot' would probably be an understatement.

Michael Moore called this one months ago. I hope the lesson of this election is not lost on anyone.

http://michaelmoore.com/trumpwillwin/

I think Michael Moore said it best.

"I ask you to imagine how much different our world would be if WikiLeaks had existed 10 years ago. Take a look at this photo. That's Mr. Bush about to be handed a "secret" document on August 6th, 2001. Its heading read: "Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US." And on those pages it said the FBI had discovered "patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings." Mr. Bush decided to ignore it and went fishing for the next four weeks.

But if that document had been leaked, how would you or I have reacted? What would Congress or the FAA have done? Was there not a greater chance that someone, somewhere would have done something if all of us knew about bin Laden's impending attack using hijacked planes?"

read more at http://www.michaelmoore.com/words/mike-friends-blog/why-im-posting-bail-money

A couple of articles to back up the African oil spill claim:

http://www.michaelmoore.com/words/latest-news/africas-oil-spills-are-far-us-media-glare

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/africa/niger-delta-bears-brunt-after-50-years-of-oil-spills-421634.html

It very true that we operate with a "out of sight, out of mind" mentality, particularly here in the western world. Oil companies don't deal with many of the spill scenarios they create well enough simply because they aren't being held accountable. Social responsibility should be a requirement for corporations.

But do I really care? I drive a small SUV.

(answer: of course I still care!)

>You have taken this photo from https://www.michaelmoore.com/p/i-was-elected-50-years-ago-to...

Not true.

The source you allude to in your comment is Michael Moore's June 12, 2022 post on michaelmoore.com.

In fact, my blog post [OP] is dated September 14, 2011; Dwight Garner's review of Moore's book in the New York Times:

https://archive.ph/M0OF

appeared on September 13, 2011, and was the basis for my blog post which included the picture under discussion.