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Pitching high and tight to Michael Moore

Michael Moore was getting himself into a lather, which is to say Michael Moore was starting to act like Michael Moore.

"It's a small example of what we, the American people, have to put up with, day in and day out, with a lazy, inadequate press that refuses to do their job and tell the whole truth," he bellowed. This was late Tuesday afternoon at the Essex House on Central Park South where, before 150 foreign journalists gathered in advance of the international release of Fahrenheit 9/11 , he wanted to set the record straight and respond to the controversy over the film. I should be clear: this wasn't the controversy over whether F9/11 contained any factual inaccuracies, as some journalists have suggested. No, Moore was steamed over Ray Bradbury's complaint last month that he'd wrongly appropriated the title Fahrenheit 451 .

Moore's voice rising in anger, he noted that Bradbury had frequently appropriated titles and lines written by others. "Isn't that weird, that not a single journalist -- again, I don't mean to be confrontational to our lazy and not-so-bright press in America, but I've read every article and I've just been waiting for one literate journalist to remember that Something Wicked this Way Comes is a famous line from Macbeth," he snapped. "Ray Bradbury wrote a book called The Golden Apples of the Sun , that's a line from a poem by Yeats. Ray Bradbury wrote a book called I Sing the Body Electric , that's the title of a poem by Walt Whitman.

"I have not read that story anywhere!"

The lazy press is a favourite new theme of Moore's, since he faults the news media -- particularly TV journalists -- for not pressing the Bush administration on its prewar claims of Iraq's unconventional weaponry. Not the press in this room, mind you. No, Moore wouldn't want to shoot the messengers who might carry positive news of his film to their countrymen.

Besides, most of the foreign journalists love Moore. Many of them, like the Australian woman wearing jeans with a flowery pattern snaking down each leg, were there to throw him softballs about their own country's complicity in the war. Over the course of more than 90 minutes, Moore called on the people of Australia, Italy, England, Japan and the other countries that formed the "coalition of the willing" to exercise "regime change" against their leaders for backing Bush.

While some of the journalists nodded their heads in keen agreement, his request got under my skin. It reflected a typically American arrogance -- his assumption that the war should be the primary issue for foreign voters simply because it's the primary issue for him. After all, Australian Prime Minister John Howard's approval rating is still very high, despite his commitment of troops to Iraq, since most Australians support his policies in other areas.

But spending time around Moore can be infectious. All that talk about my lazy American colleagues shirking their responsibility to put the tough questions to Bush made me feel guilty by association. I wanted to prove I couldn't be pushed around like them. So I put a question to Moore, referencing David Denby's New Yorker review of Fahrenheit 9/11 , asking something that had bothered me when I saw it.

I appreciated the j'accuse nature of the film, but I wanted to know why it didn't address the dangers of armed Islamic fundamentalism, obsessive anti-Westernism, suicide terrorists, and what Moore thinks would be the proper approach for the U.S. government to legitimately conduct itself in a fight against terrorism. After all, if you're going to criticize measures like the Patriot Act, wouldn't you want to offer an alternative?

Moore took a moment to compose his answer. "Night after night, we are hammered on our television networks and our cable news channels about the Islamic fundamentalists. We've seen it all, we've heard it all," he began, speaking unusually slowly and deliberately. "My job is to say: Maybe there's something else going on, maybe there's another piece of information you should have before making up your mind. Maybe you should see an opposing viewpoint once in a while in this country. The corporate media in this country, they've got control of it 24/7, 365 days of the year. My film is our humble plea: Can we have just two hours for our side?

"The second part of your question is: How do you fight a war against religious fundamentalists? Well, that's what we're doing in this country, and I hope we're successful on November 2."

It was a funny quip, and many of the journalists laughed and applauded Moore's response. But the joke disappointed me, because he was using it to avoid answering the question. I wanted to push him on the issue, and on his avoidance of the issue. But a press assistant had taken away my microphone and handed it to another journalist, who threw Moore another softball.