In a post that rightly excoriates apparent Surgeon General nominee Sanjay Gupta for his feckless fact-checking of Michael Moore’s Sicko, Ezra Klein acts as if journalists are being unreasonable in scrutinizing Moore’s work closely:

Begin with this: Michael Moore makes journalists lose their mind. They have an almost compulsive need to prove him wrong.

Similarly, Paul Krugman attributes Gupta’s report to “Village behavior”:

What bothered me about the incident was that it was what Digby would call Village behavior: Moore is an outsider, he’s uncouth, so he gets smeared as unreliable even though he actually got it right.

Reading Klein and Krugman, one would think that journalists routinely scrutinize Moore’s work. However, as Ben Fritz and I wrote last year in a column about the debate over Sicko, the reality is that Moore has always been an “uncouth” “outsider” yet his work drew very little mainstream scrutiny for years. Moreover, Fritz, our Spinsanity colleague Bryan Keefer, and I documented an extensive range of inaccuracies, errors, and distortions in Moore’s previous work, including his films “Bowling for Columbine” and “Fahrenheit 9/11” and his books “Stupid White Men” and “Dude, Where’s My Country?”. As Fritz and I argued, “[w]hile “Sicko” may not have any major factual errors, we shouldn’t let Moore (or anyone else) whitewash his many problems with the truth.”