Bowling for truth

I used to be a big Michael Moore fan, based on seeing Roger and Me. Of course, I didn’t live anywhere near Flint, Michigan, so I didn’t really have any historical context on which to base my judgement. And as a result, I assumed that what I was seeing was the truth. Why? Because it was a documentary.
Or so I thought.
I started to lose my respect for Michael Moore the day after the Academy Awards. As you may or may not remember, he got his fellow documentary nominees up on stage with him and berated Bush for the war.
Now, it’s not that I don’t agree that we probably shouldn’t have gone to war. I do agree with that. But the next day, I read that his fellow nominees had had no idea that that was what he was going to do.
That’s just plain wrong, in my view.
But still, I had a lot of respect for Moore and the biting wit I had seen in Roger and Me. Until, that is, I started seeing some disturbing news about Moore’s winning film, Bowling For Columbine. And it came from several sources:
Dave Kopel on Michael Moore on National Review Online
Spinsanity – Viewer beware: In “Bowling for Columbine,” Michael Moore once again puts distortions and contradictions before the truth
Rachel Lucas: Michael Moore is a liar Archives
Truth about Bowling for Columbine
Quacking for Columbine
So now I wonder: when is a documentary not a documentary? I mean, isn’t a documentary supposed to tell the true story of something or somebody?