Roeper isn't the only journalist edging over the thin yellow line between politics and prose. Francine Prose says when she reviewed the Clinton memoir for Newsday, she knew that "... regardless of the literary merits of the book, the human being that was going to appear from those pages would be superior to the people in the current administration." According the Jack Shafer's Slate article about the Clinton reviews, Prose's "main motivation" was writing about politics. The Shafer article is fascinating for two reasons. It takes another step in making the process of journalism - or, I suppose, media-making - more transparent. "I read the early chapters on Clinton's childhood, high school, and Oxford experiences," Washington Post Op-Ed writer Anne Applebaum told Shafer, "skipped the Arkansas governorship, and went on to the presidency. Then I got stuck." New York Observer reviewer Robert Sam Anson reportedly "prepped himself for the review…

Richard Roeper has an article in the Sun-Times that draws the right lines about F911 and what Moore is and isn't:Yes, "Fahrenheit 9/11" omits some facts and details that would add balance, and the truth sometimes gets stretched and bent to Moore's convenience. ... Michael Moore is a skilled editorialist and performance artist who advances his viewpoints though manipulation of news footage, music, cartoons and his own considerable, Woody Allen-esque comedic skills. Link-generatrix Torri Oats sent me that one too. Sign of the times, I guess, when movie critics dive this deep into politics. In NYT, Nick Kristof's alarm about partisan brawling spilling out of the clubhouse into the moviehouse is the only reasonable commentary I've seen on that issue. I still think it's a good thing that Moore is bringing the fight up to the ramparts of pop culture, where the action seems to be, but Kristof is a…

What is the deal with the violent responses to Fahrenheit 9/11? Is it any surprise to David Brooks or Chris Hitchens that Michael Moore is an attention-grabber, an occasional panderer and a showman not a journalist? When you attack Michael Moore for being a weak intellectual or a fact-manipulator, you miss the point and you sound awfully defensive besides. It's particularly dismaying to me to see the scathing sarcasm in Brooks's Saturday column in The Times and in Hitchens's recent Slate piece. Both attacks on Moore reveal the writers' own elitism. Here's Hitchens:From Fahrenheit 9/11 you can glean even more astounding and hidden disclosures, such as the capitalist nature of American society, the existence of Eisenhower's "military-industrial complex," and the use of "spin" in the presentation of our politicians. It's high time someone had the nerve to point this out. There's more. Poor people often volunteer to join the army,…