SICKO: Muckraker for the YouTube age

Muckraker for the YouTube age

By Renée Loth / Boston Globe

AS A journalist, Michael Moore is the perfect antidote to the blow-dried network anchor. Biased, untidy, shambling like a flannel-shirted Columbo through his gotcha interviews, Moore is hot where the traditional newsman is cool, personal where the mainstream press keeps a professional distance. But in today's fragmented media environment, Moore is a force -- albeit an uncomfortable one -- in the 2008 campaign.

Moore's new documentary, "Sicko," is clearly designed to influence the presidential policy debate. At the Democratic candidate's forum held at Howard University last week, Representative Dennis Kucinich of Ohio called for guaranteed access to quality healthcare for all Americans and an end to for-profit medicine. "Michael Moore is right about this!" Kucinich declared.

And Moore has far higher name recognition than Kucinich. A muckraker for the YouTube age, Moore has taken on factory closings ("Roger and Me") , gun violence ("Bowling for Columbine"), child labor at US companies overseas ("The Big One"), and the Iraq war ("Fahrenheit 911") . Part agitprop, part popular culture, his films join blogs, videos, rock 'n ' roll anthems, Washington tell-all books, and MySpace pages as powerful new ways to reach voters and shape the campaign storyline.

Voters and candidates are increasingly moving toward these new media. The trend first became evident to me in 1992, when I covered the role of the media in the presidential campaign. That was an extraordinary year, when pop culture discovered politics, and vice-versa. It was when MTV hired a 20-year-old political reporter, when appearing on Phil Donahue's daytime talk show was as big a deal as "60 Minutes," when Bill Clinton played saxophone on the Arsenio Hall show. (Clinton beat George H.W. Bush even though Bush outspent Clinton on traditional TV ads, which were already starting to lose their power.)

Now, with "Sicko," Moore has tapped deep into the 2008 zeitgeist: Voters in both parties consistently cite healthcare as their number one domestic policy concern. As in most of his films, Moore focuses on the plight of ordinary working-class Americans -- a silent majority to much of Hollywood, Washington and newspaper row. Their stories of medical neglect at the hands of faceless insurance bureaucrats are heartbreaking and enraging at the same time.

Moore isn't the first filmmaker to recognize the people's frustration with health insurers. Ten years ago James Brooks directed "As Good As it Gets," starring Jack Nicholson, where in one brief scene Helen Hunt's character is unable to get medical attention for her chronically ill son. She slams down a telephone with a frustrated, earthy epithet for her HMO. Audiences around the country broke into applause.

But unlike that passing moment, the "Sicko" phenomenon includes an elaborate infrastructure of Web postings, fact-checkers , and e-mails alerts. Unlike Hillary Clinton, who is gently lampooned in the film for her failed effort at healthcare reform in 1993, Moore has prepared for any opposition with a fortress of counterspin, even hiring Chris Lehane, John Kerry's erstwhile media consultant, to advise him.

Working with the California Nurses Association and other advocacy groups, Moore has given an activist dimension to his film, making it into a kind of cinematic leaflet. His website exhorts visitors to post their insurance nightmares online and sign petitions to Congress. "This film stands the chance of igniting a movement," Moore said in an e-mail to supporters.

"Sicko" is powerful enough -- and just commercial enough -- to do for the healthcare system what Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" is doing for global warming. But there's a hitch: With the exception of Kucinich, the Democratic presidential candidates are just offering variations on ways to expand health insurance to cover more Americans. Most of the desperate, ailing people in "Sicko" already have insurance. Instead, their lives are being ruined by a health insurance system that restricts care to maximize profits. It turns out Moore is trying not just to advance the political discussion about healthcare, but to challenge it.

With so little daylight between the major candidates on the issue, it takes a rogue agitator like Michael Moore to offer a second opinion. And that suggests it's not just our healthcare system, but our political system, that's ailing.