How Bowling for Columbine Is Bias Essay

Bowling for Columbine is a documentary directed by American filmmaker and activist, Michael Moore. The political documentary focuses on the 1999 school shootings that occurred in Columbine, Colorado, and Flint, Michigan and the correlation of guns to the high homicide rates in America. Moore argues that the number one problem the United States faces is gun control. Moore effectively uses ethos, pathos, and logos appeals to present an unbiased and informational view of the issue of gun violence in America. He also uses the fallacious argumentative strategy, ad hominem. Moore does not put his own direct bias into the film, he instead shows both sides of the argument to allow the viewer to decide for themselves which side they are on.

To begin, Moore struggles to appeal to ethos successfully due to his manipulative methods that raises the audience's skepticism in his credibility, despite using many strong sources such as his reputation, experience, and the values of other experts in a desperate attempt to gain the audience’s trust. Throughout the documentary, Moore is able to tactfully utilize his renowned reputation as a filmmaker to ensure that his audience will believe everything that he presents. By dressing like an “average Joe” and showing his own hometown of Flint, Michigan, a “gun-loving town”, Moore is able to portray himself as the average American citizen who just wants facts and answers from the people. This is successfully used in the film as Moore seems more reliable to the audience, and makes his interviewees feel equal to Moore. Moreover, Moore also interviews many credible people who are able to back

In the film, Bowling for Columbine, the director Michael Moore takes an extent look at what could have made these teenagers to do such a thing. He doesn’t just look at the terrible event at Columbine High School, but also at the NRA's effects on people, the 2nd amendment, other school shootings, and how the United States compared to other countries gun-control explanations such as Canada. Michael Moore looks as a sociologist would such as C. Wright Mills in which he explores the outside factors of the individuals, but how the personal troubles of the two teenagers involved are related to immense conditions of our society. He doesn’t look at the intellectual make up of each person who creates a crime, but instead looks at how our society as a whole views guns and their uses.

However, through the intelligent use of film techniques such as Omissions, editing (scene placement) and non-diegetic sounds, there is an obvious bias presented to the audience, as Moore wants to specifically convey a messages which benefits an agenda which he is following. The documentaries, Fahrenheit 9/11 and Bowling for Columbine will be further explored through the analysis of its film techniques which indefinitely create an obvious bias and the positive and negative outcomes it has regarding Michael Moore’s film message.

A documentary is a genre of film that provides a factual report on a particular story, viewpoint, message or experience. In this essay, two documentaries, Bowling for columbine by Michael Moore and Made in Bangladesh by CBC news will be explored to show how persuasive techniques are used to make an audience feel a particular way.

The Columbine Shooting has solidified itself as a tragic event in America’s past, and was a real wake-up call to the nation’s age-old gun problem. Michael Moore looks into this issue and decides it provides a great premise for his next documentary, his next crusade to flush out the evils of this world. The problem is, Bowling for Columbine is far from the truth; it is rather a distorted representation of reality, carefully sequenced to push Michael Moore’s agenda. If we look past the film techniques, conspiracy theories,

There are many strengths and weaknesses in this film. One of Moore’s strengths was that he uses many entertainments to portray most of his argument. Moore uses interviews with the public and celebrities, history of our country, crude humor, footage that was extremely ruthless and alarming, as well as hands on experiments Another strength is that he provides evidence as to what he’s saying. One weakness is that sometimes he goes off topic, or sometimes he also contradicts himself. Moore uses many pathos, ethos, and logos through out the whole film. First off, this film is filled with pathos, it is all very emotional due to all the tragic events mentioned. With ethos it does show a lot of credibility through out the whole movie. Lastly, the film does state many facts, statistics, and evidence. For example, the correlation of people killed all around the world and the laws that each country has. On fallacy found in the documentary is how he always tries to prove something from what he says. This is called or also known as Ad Hominem fallacy. He

er the the years the documentary genre has been seen to have evolved and as to has the definition of a documentary. A documentary is an informative, non-fiction genre that presents the idea of ‘reality’ to audience members and relates to the idea of a text having common elements of which the audience can relate and identify. In the documentary, “Bowling for Columbine” directed by Michael Moore (2002), we as an audience follow Moore as he explores America’s violent history and whilst making us more aware of gun control in America he is also altering viewers opinions on gun control. This reading will explore the documentary conventions of interviews, montage and hand-held camera featured in Bowling For Columbine and question whether Michael Moore has used these conventions to subtly influence the way the audience feel about gun control in America whilst also manipulating the film to make it look like “reality”.

causing a breach of trust due to the documentary project losing its integrity, as the audiences realizes that the people being fi)med are not who they claim to be or did not do anything that they been seen on screen doin(.' Flaherty has made his greatest impact through manipulating the story that he wanted to tell, changing customs in order to make sure that his vision of the story is told, he trades carefully on the thin fine line in distinguishing between fiction and documentary that Michael Moore is frequently criticized for today.

Documentary films in particular have been the preferred channel for the diffusion of propaganda because of its association with ‘a truthful cinema.’ John Grierson, coiner the term documentary, defined it as “the creative treatment of actuality.” However, Hilmar Hoffman talks about film’s illusory power by explaining that what exists to the viewer is only what the camera ‘sees,’ and due to the absence of alternate perspectives, the viewer conventionally perceives the images shown as reality. In this regard, documentary films are able to influence, represent, and create a particular consciousness by doctoring events, thus making it untrustworthy and, ultimately, the ideal medium to communicate

In the movie Bowling for Columbine, directed by Michael Moore, you see Moore talking to many people on why the Columbine shooting happened. He looks for clues on what could have caused this and how easily it may have been avoided.

Michael Moore tries to bring some extremely imperative points and the closer view of American culture and to some degree succeeds. In order to achieve this, Moore utilizes particular references to it and utilizes rhetorical and convincing devices to develop his contention for changing weapon laws; thus, one unmistakable expository request he utilizes as a part of the film is, besides the recurrent pathos, ethos. In any case, by controlling distinctive things and misleading the viewer in this film make it disputable to completely concur with what he needs to say. The presentation of Bowling is a purported footage from a NRA film, declaring that the viewer is going to see a National Rifle Association film. Clearly, Bowling is not a NRA film,

Bowling For Columbine is a well-directed documentary that informs people about gun violence in America. Michael Moore is successful in showing that America has been going through many gun tragedies; and portrays the sense that America’s problems are out of control. He conveys this through informative facts, images, and comparisons.

The point of Bowling for Columbine isn’t to be biased as Michael Moore would want you to believe, no, the point is that Bowling is purposefully, and consistently deceptive. After the tragic shooting at Columbine, the documentary shows haunting vision of distraught children outside of the school, then, cuts quickly to a billboard advertising a NRA meeting in Littleton, Denver. Moore then narrates “Just ten days after the Columbine killings, despite the pleas of the mourning community,

Michael Moore is a wonderful director but, I honestly don’t think he deserve this award for Best Documentary Feature Film Because during his documentary he chose two random interview that so ever had no significance to each other. Moore takes seven different sentences from five different parts of Heston’s speech and splices them together to create one speech. Not to mention the infamous line “from my cold, dead hands.” This line was actually taken from a speech a year later when Heston was presented with a hand made musket, One of those scenes was Charles Heston holding a gun wearing a different type of tie with a different color at the rally conference.