A couple days ago, Paul Krugman took Sanjay Gupta to task for having challenged the facts of Michael Moore's Sicko when in reality it was Gupta, not Moore, who had his facts wrong.
Today, Andrew Sullivan chimes in, "Krugman is restless about the stimulus and Gupta (no Michael Moore critics are allowed in Obamaland)." But that wasn't Krugman's point at all! As Krugman wrote:
Many commenters don’t seem to get the point. Gupta didn’t say “Michael Moore is an annoying blowhard”; he didn’t say “We question his interpretation of the evidence”; he said he “fudged the facts”. In other words, he accused Moore of lying. That’s a very strong accusation, which had better be backed by solid evidence. Instead, we had CNN misreading a number from Moore; CNN objecting to Moore using a projected health care spending number for 2007 instead of an actual number for 2005 (and the projection was right, by the way); CNN accusing Moore of not showing a number that was in fact right there in the movie. And Gupta did not apologize, except for the misread number.
Moore is worse than an annoying blowhard, but he's right on health care. You don't need to fudge the facts to make a damning left-wing critique of the American health care system.
--Jonathan Chait