No match for the great Paul Foot

By chance, I happened to see Michael Moore's film Fahrenheit 9/11 the evening before the death of the journalist Paul Foot was announced. I admired Foot for his old-fashioned campaigning journalism, doggedly undertaken to correct what he saw as injustice. He took up causes that barely crossed other journalists' radar, such as that of the Bridgewater Four, and one of the most sincere tributes came from Ann Whelan, whose son was released from prison as a result. "Paul's lasting legacy to me and many others was to stand up and fight for what you believe to be right," she wrote.

There is no doubt that that is what Moore would claim to be doing and his film has been welcomed in some circles as a damning indictment of the Bush administration. Fahrenheit 9/11 has done extraordinarily well at the box office for a documentary, assisted by a controversy about distribution before it even opened. It is powerful in parts and no one could watch the footage of dreadfully wounded Iraqi children without experiencing a sense of revulsion towards the war - or indeed any war. We are usually protected from such images, which is why they have such power to shock. But that does not alter the fact that the film is a mess, an uneasy mix of satire, stunts and reportage.

This doesn't mean I have changed my mind about the war. I still think it was wrong and I am heartily sick of Tony Blair's self-satisfied grin as the democratic process fails to hold him to account. But I am proud that he has been challenged every step of the way by journalists, both in broadcasting and the press. The Government's response has been furious and vindictive - how many more scalps does it require from the BBC? - but at least it has been forced to face its critics. In the US, the success of Fahrenheit 9/11 is a symptom of the failure of most of the media to challenge the Bush administration, to the point where astonishing numbers of people have been gulled into believing lies such as the legendary (in all senses) connection between al-Qa'ida and Saddam Hussein.

I'm amazed by how often friends living in the US have told me that they depend on British newspapers and the BBC to find out what is really happening in their country. Some of the big American TV networks are openly propagandist, preferring jingoistic posturing to the truth; most observers seemed to have forgotten, when photographs surfaced of the abuse of Iraqi prisoners by US soldiers, that the Fox news channel had given airtime in 2001 to advocates of torture. At the same time, the American press is going through a bad period, with local newspapers not wishing to appear unpatriotic and the reputation of one of its most outstanding journals, The New York Times, tarnished by scandals unrelated to the Iraq war.

In this atmosphere, Moore's film has appeared to some like a glass of water in a desert, providing a focus for opposition to the conflict. But Moore pulls his punches in relation to Saddam's regime, appearing to suggest that Iraq was a serene, peace-loving country before the American-led invasion last year. He makes a great deal of documents suggesting that dozens of Saudis, including members of the Bin Laden family, were allowed to leave the US in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. But only one Bin Laden has been accused of having links to the 9/11 atrocities, and he was safely in Afghanistan at the time. Any decent journalist would query the film's reasoning, as well as questioning its juxtaposition of pranks and clips from old movies with the raw grief of a mother whose soldier son has just been killed in Iraq.

But Moore is no Paul Foot and Fahrenheit 9/11 is propaganda, manipulating audiences as shamelessly as any advert for the campaign to re-elect George Bush. It is a maddening exercise, displaying neither the scepticism nor the intellectual rigour essential to investigative journalism. It does not say much for the state of public debate in the US that the President's best-known critic is a comedian with a taste for cheap shots.