Michael Moore's previous films have generated a cottage industry of conservative commentators eager to find examples of sloppiness and exaggeration, but as New York Times reporter Philip Shenon observes, "if 'Fahrenheit 9/11' attracts the audience Mr. Moore and his distributors are predicting, Mr. Moore may face an onslaught of fact-checking unlike anything he - or any other documentary filmmaker - has ever experienced.

"If your calling is journalism, you enter the job market at the same time that that the long and honorable history of American journalism is traveling through the digestive tract of the disinfotainment industry," declared writer Howard Rheingold in his recent commencement speech at Stanford University. "But at the same time, you arrive on the scene just at the moment something broader, faster, and perhaps more democratic than the invention of journalism is emerging. ...

The White House and Fox News are spinning furiously in response to the 9/11 commission's recent report, which contradicts one of the administration's key arguments for war with its finding that there was no working relationship between Iraq and Al Qaeda.