Word: tainment
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...suburban family that viewers had to resolve for themselves. And Winged Migration turned every moviegoer into an awestruck ornithologist. The moral: films needn't serve as just pacifiers or pulse racers. That's what Hollywood does. Get people arguing, thinking. Stir them to anger or awe. That's docu-tainment...
...Fahrenheit? was both an event and a fluke. Moore made it, and sold it, with a combination of indefatigable ingenuity and churlish charisma. He, not Bush, was the star at the movie?s center. And he wasn?t only angry; he was also funny. That?s docu-tainment...
...three network anchormen, for a mere movie even to attempt such a thing would have seemed folly. Today people get their news and, just as important, their attitudes from more rambunctious sources--the polarized polemicists on talk radio and cable news channels, comedians and webmasters. That's poli-tainment, and as practiced by Rush Limbaugh and other right-wing hosts on radio and by Matt Drudge on the Internet, it hounded Bill Clinton's presidency while spicing and coarsening the standards of political discourse...
...Moore the left wing has now found its own Falstaff of the political revels, a figure who can punch as hard and fast--and as recklessly?--as anybody the right has to offer. And Fahrenheit 9/11 may be the watershed event that demonstrates whether the empire of poli-tainment can have decisive influence on a presidential campaign. If it does, we may come to look back on its hugely successful first week the way we now think of the televised presidential debate between John Kennedy and Richard Nixon, as a moment when we grasped for the first time the potential...
Before Michael Moore, the new faces of poli-tainment were radio shock jocks RUSH LIMBAUGH and HOWARD STERN, who were paired on TIME's cover in 1993. The question from a decade ago echoes the one being raised today in connection with Moore's movie: Is America's political discourse getting coarser...