UPDATE: There is more on this story that you can read here.
You can read my own account of meeting Moore, long before he was “the”
Michael Moore, here.
I was not going to step into this mess, which many people have contacted me about over the last couple weeks. But because of my anti-nuclear background and my familiarity with all that went down in Midland, this one particularly pained me. So I am breaking my silence. I was involved in the research and fact checking process for various of Michael’s film, TV and book projects from the 1990s through 2007. During that period, Michael cared enough about the accuracy of his films that he complied when others told him he had to make changes to reflect facts and reality. I personally factually annotated some of these films and put entire “fact check bibles” on film websites. I dealt with studio lawyers doing fact and libel checks until they were satisfied. Believe me, by the time these projects saw the light of day, they were airtight. The director of this new film was someone we never let near the fact checking process. In my experience, he seemed attracted to conspiracy theories and information that was not factual, and I believed his influence on Michael could be damaging to his films. I cannot speak to what happened to Michael’s films after I stopped helping to ensure their accuracy but it is excruciating to see what has happened now – although it is not surprising. People disturbed by inaccuracies in this film are not “haters.” They, like I, are pained by them. The factual errors should never have happened.
Center for Democracy and Justice at New York Law School:
Joanne Doroshow is the founder and executive director of the Center for Justice & Democracy and co-founder of Americans for Insurance Reform (AIR). She is also Adjunct Professor at New York Law School, where she teaches “Civil Justice & National Advocacy.” An attorney, Doroshow has worked on civil justice issues since 1986, when she directed an insurance industry and liability project for Ralph Nader. Together, they developed some of the first educational materials used to fight “tort reform” around the country including Goliath: Lloyd’s of London in the United States (1988) and Safeguarding Democracy: The Case for the Civil Jury (1992).
Doroshow founded CJ&D in 1998. As CJ&D Executive Director, she has testified before the U.S. Congress many times and appeared before numerous state legislatures around the country. She has written or co-authored numerous CJ&D studies and white papers on civil justice and insurance issues for both CJ&D and AIR. As a nationally recognized civil justice expert, she has appeared on television and radio programs on CBS, ABC, NBC, PBS, CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, CNBC, C-SPAN, and NPR. She is regularly quoted in newspapers nationwide, including the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, Miami Herald and Los Angeles Times.
Doroshow has film and television production experience as well. She was one of the producers of the 1992 Academy Award-winning documentary, The Panama Deception, and has worked on the theatrical, broadcast and video distribution of a number of films. In 1994 and 1995, she was a Segment Producer and Coordinating Producer for TV Nation, the Emmy Award-winning humorous political show. She was also a Coordinating Producer of the documentary SiCKO (2007) and an Associate Producer of Fahrenheit 9/11.
From 1981 through 1985, Doroshow was lead counsel and spokesperson for TMI Alert, a community group working to block the restart of the TMI-1 nuclear reactor after the 1979 Three Mile Island accident and whose case reached the U.S. Supreme Court. In 1982, she worked on the successful Supreme Court appeal of the Karen Silkwood case. From 1989 to 1990, Doroshow was the director of California-based Bhopal Justice Campaign, a coalition of community groups and leaders fighting for statewide support for victims of the India gas disaster.
Can’t take seriously someone working to shut Three Mile Island 1 (or keep it shut – there’s no technical reason it can’t restart.) Pennsylvania is getting about twice as much power from nuclear as from coal, and about six times as much as from solar and wind combined. If she can follow the scientific evidence that climate change is happening, there is equally compelling evidence that even a rare accident like TMI 1 has had no major effect on the people and land around it. Most of the world is now below replacement level for population, but the people already here need energy – we’d crash to pre-industrial numbers and misery levels without it. Those in places like Africa, which still have high reproduction rates, but have done very little to bring on climate disruption, deserve cheap energy’s benefits too. Nuclear’s not cheap? It’s cheap to run (accounting for it’s reliability and longevity). It should be cheap to build, too – and has been, in places where a national-scale effort happened.