It seems only natural that this would happen. There is a story going around the web news sites that claim a “gotcha” on Michael Moore. They say, more or less in synch:

Michael Moore said during an interview with CNN on Thursday that he was aware shortly after he began shooting Fahrenheit 9/11 that Disney chief Michael Eisner had told his agent that “he was upset Miramax had made the film and he will not distribute it.” Moore’s remarks appeared to be at odds with a statement that he had posted the previous day on his website saying that he had learned only on Monday that Disney intended to bar Miramax from distributing the movie, and they raised the question of whether Moore was bringing up the issue now in order to manufacture controversy over the film in order to promote it.

This story appeared on Disney’s own “Mickey News,” and has been reprinted, either verbatim or very close to that, in many places. Indeed, Moore did say that Eisner had made that statement:

A month later, after shooting started, Michael Eisner insisted on meeting with my agent, Ari Emanuel. Eisner was furious that Miramax signed this deal with me. According to Mr. Emanuel, Eisner said he would never let my film be distributed through Disney even though Mr. Eisner had not seen any footage or even read the outline of the film. Eisner told my agent that he did not want to anger Jeb Bush, the governor of Florida. The movie, he believed, would complicate an already complicated situation with current and future Disney projects in Florida, and that many millions of dollars of tax breaks and incentives were at stake.

But what all of these thinly-veiled attack stories have in common is that they all conveniently ignore his next paragraph:

But Michael Eisner did not call Miramax and tell them to stop my film. Not only that, for the next year, SIX MILLION dollars of DISNEY money continued to flow into the production of making my movie. Miramax assured me that there were no distribution problems with my film.

In other words, Moore had every reason to believe that things had been smoothed out. After all, would Disney spend six million dollars on a film they never planned to release?

But stories that are circulating completely ignore that part of Moore’s statement, or dismiss it casually as “spin.” This is either widespread yellow journalism, or just one case of yellow journalism followed by a plethora of news outlets being lazy and just taking the original smear at face value without bothering to check the facts.

Chalk one more up for the “liberal media.” Those guys….