Did Moore actually have a point to make? I think he did, and if he'd done a bit of research, he could have made a great one.

One of Bowling's themes is fear: fear of crime, fear of blacks. And how the media hypes this, terrifies people to make a fast buck, even when violence has dropped to its lowest level in decades. (Thought: does Bowling do the same?)

Years ago, Marshall McLuhan ("The Medium Is The Message" and other works) opened up the field of communications theory with the argument that television is qualitatively different as a medium. It turns us into a global village. It is personal and immediate. In a village, you know what is going on, experience it, because you see what is happening, it's in your front yard. Anything beyond the village is stuff you know little about and don't worry much about. With TV, the world becomes your village. It happens, actually happens, in your front room. Once the TV media begins hyping violence, that happens in your front room. It hits you in the gut, so to speak. It is completely different from the written word, which you intellectualize.

Example:

You read a story about a murder with a fork 1,000 miles away. Big deal. The writer says fork murders are on the increase. You laugh at the insult to your intelligence. He inserts a black and white photo of a bloody fork.

You are not very frightened. You thought about the story, intellectualized it. You recognize that it is distant from you and discard it. It is not threatening.

TV news covers it. Police cars, yellow warning ribbons. A blood splattered room, a bent fork in a policeman's hand. (Yes, and images of a black male being put in a squadcar). The officer says fork murders are on the rise, and the announcer looks you in the eye and confirms it.

It grabs you. You don't process it with your intellect. It's not an isolated event a thousand miles away. At an instinctive level, it happened in your front room. It's happening all over. You didn't read about it, you experienced it.

Now, that would be an interesting exploration for Moore to have undertaken, rather than wandering around making passing observations about Canada and TV. COPS is important, not just because it tends to show a lot of blacks being arrested and hauled away, but because it shows them being busted, repeatedly, in YOUR front room. It's happening to you. It's happening in your house or yard. And it's happening several times a night. And, yes, it's reaching directly to your emotions.

Bowling never bothers with an analysis of that. Perhaps because it would have taken some research and serious thought.

Or perhaps because that's exactly what Bowling is itself doing. Barry Glassner's insightful book "The Culture of Fear" points out that "More than three times as many people are killed by lightning as by violence at schools." But with Bowling, schoolyard homicide happens frequently. It happens in your front room. And it sells, even wins Oscars. Moore interviewed Glassner for the film; in fact when Moore points out how irrational our fears are (the Halloween candy example, and flesh-eating bacteria) he took the examples right out of Glassner's book. If Glassner had something to say about school violence, however (and it's hard to believe he wasn't asked) that was left on the cutting room floor.