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The title of the film refers to Ray Bradbury's novel Fahrenheit 451 and the September 11 attacks of 2001. The Fahrenheit 451 reference is emphasized by the film's tagline "The temperature where freedom burns" (compare with Fahrenheit 451's tagline, "The temperature at which books burn"). Moore has stated that the title came from the subject of an e-mail he received shortly after September 11th.
Ray Bradbury was upset by what he considered the appropriation of his title, saying of Moore, "he stole my title and changed the numbers without ever asking me for permission", and calling Moore a "horrible human being" (both quotes occurred in an interview with the Swedish daily newspaper Dagens Nyheter. [1]). He also reportedly is demanding an apology from Moore and wants the film renamed [2]. However, since Bradbury has not trademarked the title, legal action is unlikely.
When Dagens Nyheter asked him about his own political position, Bradbury replied: "That has nothing to do with it. He copied my title; that is what happened. That has nothing to do with my political opinions." It is not unusual for titles to allude to or quote familiar works of literature. Several of Bradbury's own titles are quotations, although from dead authors: "Something Wicked This Way Comes" ( Shakespeare); "I Sing the Body Electric!" ( Whitman) and "Golden Apples of the Sun" ( Yeats).
The group Move America Forward , which has ties to Sacramento, California PR firm Russo, Marsh and Rogers , the campaign to prevent CBS from showing The Reagans, and the campaign to unseat California Governor Gray Davis, mounted a letter-writing campaign to ask theaters not to show the film, which it compared to "an al-Qaeda training video" [3]. "We've been causing them [the cinemas] an enormous amount of aggravation." said talk radio host Melanie Morgan . [4] However, no theaters reported cancelling their showings.
Some critics contend that Fahrenheit 9/11 contains distortions and untruth. Some say that the movie is " propaganda." In response, Moore has published both an extensive list of facts and sources for Fahrenheit 9/11 and a document establishing agreements between the points made in his film and the findings of the September 11 Commission. Both can be found on his personal website as well as several others.
The introduction to the movie includes a collage of video footage depicting the events surrounding the U.S. 2000 presidential election, particularly those involving the contested Florida recount. This fragment of the movie is presented to convey the illegitimacy of Bush as a president. It includes a newspaper headline reporting that Gore actually received more votes in Florida than Bush did and a quote by Michael Moore expressing his opinion that Gore would have won if the Supreme Court had not interfered with the recount process. This assertion has been criticized because there are differing views of what would have happened. The movie shows a clip of CNN legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin stating that "if there was a state-wide recount, under every scenario, Gore won the election." A comprehensive six-month study commissioned by a consortium of media organizations including CNN, The New York Times, and the Washington Post concluded that Gore would have won if there had been a statewide recount of all disputed ballots. The study also concluded that Bush would have won the election under the recount system in place at the time the US Supreme Court intervened to halt the recount, and that Bush would have won under a partial-recount scheme suggested by Gore. For more information, refer to the Florida Ballot Project recounts. In the end, Al Gore won 543,895 more votes overall, but because of the outcome in Florida, Bush was awarded 5 more electoral college votes. [6]
Moore's description of media reports of the poll results has also been criticized. Moore states that John Prescott Ellis, a full cousin of George W. Bush, was a consultant to FOX News that night. He attributes the retractions of the call that Gore won Florida to FOX News, saying “Then something called the Fox News Channel called the election in favor of the other guy.... All of a sudden the other networks said, ‘Hey, if Fox said it, it must be true.’" However, FOX had called Florida for Gore at 7:52 pm EST, just like the other networks, and did not retract this call until 2:16 am, whereas CNN and CBS had both retracted their claims at 10 pm, four hours before FOX. FOX was the first network to call the state for Bush, at 2:16 am, and all other networks had done so within four minutes. To imply, as Moore does, that this retraction was because of FOX has been disputed, as all networks were receiving the same data from the Voter News Service at about the same time. By that time, most networks were not relying primarily on VNS, due to known malfunctions in the service. All the networks later retracted the call for Bush between 3:59 am and 4:07 am.
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