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More on the F-9/11 Front

June 18th, 2004

Moore’s film was recently given an R-rating by the MPAA for “violent and disturbing images and for language.” Moore is fighting this in public, even hiring former New York governor Mario Cuomo to argue for a PG-13.

Frankly, I’m on the fence on this one. Sure, a PG-13 would be better, and as Moore pointed out, kids 16 and under will soon be of an age where these issues will be of great importance–but quite frankly, I do not think that many kids under 17 will be crowding the theaters. The vast majority of the film’s audience, I expect, will be adult viewers.

At least, this generates good coverage for the film, and if the MPAA rating story isn’t good enough, then the conservative organization Move America Forward (they must have liked the name “MoveOn.org” so decided to rip it off) will surely help out. Its head, a guy named Howard Kaloogian (no, I didn’t make that name up) has tried to stir things up.

How? By posting a list of email addresses for movie theaters that will soon be showing Moore’s film and urging right-wingers to “speak up loudly and tell the industry executives that we don’t want this misleading and grotesque movie being shown at our local cinema.”

This is stupid for two reasons: first, the campaign gives no specifics about what people should say, and will really just fall flat as an empty threat. I mean, what will people say? I’m not going to go to see movies at your theater any more? Please. Usually when a movie plays in an area, one theater chain only has it, meaning that no one can simply threaten to go to another theater chain to see the same movie. So are a large number of conservatives going to simply give up seeing movies because the theaters showed one movie they didn’t like? Not gonna happen.

The second reason their move was stupid was that when they listed all the email addresses and other contact information for the movie theaters and chains, they made it accessible to everyone–including liberals, who promptly took up the task of contacting the theaters on the list and cheering them for running the film–and from what it seems, vastly outnumbering the conservatives calling to complain.

Oops.


UPDATE: An alert reader provided a Disinfopedia link which explains a good deal about the true nature of “Move America Forward.” Just under the rather ludicrous claim that they are a “non-partisan” organization, they list their leadership as “Republicans” and “conservatives,” mentioning Republican positions several times, not to mention dropping Reagan’s name 13 times on the “About” page. Not a single liberal mentioned on the list. Big talk about how they attacked the Reagan miniseries and got it off broadcast TV. Yeah, that’s non-partisan.

There was also a bit of a flap about the registered owner of the domain being “Russo Marsh and Rogers,” a political PR firm that has strong ties with the GOP. Immediately after the WHOIS information was exposed by several web sites, the domain registration information was changed to remove any mention of Russo Marsh and Rogers.

I don’t think there’s any secret, though. These are obviously far-right foot-soldiers working for the GOP. So what’s new?

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  1. June 18th, 2004 at 14:46 | #1

    A lot of so-called “non-partisan” organizations are getting debunked lately, like Move America Forward and those Swift Boat Veterans for Truth

  2. June 20th, 2004 at 15:27 | #2

    Disinfopedia now has an article about Russo Marsh and Rogers, the right wing muppets behind the Move America Forward sham.

    It puts some hard figures to the ‘GOP PR firm’ tag. $2,475,223 from Republican politicans in the 2001/2002 election cycle. And nothing from Dems. Surprise.

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