Michael Moore Makes Noise on YouTube

Populist documentary filmmaker Michael Moore is back this summer, this time taking on the American health care system in his film SiCKO. Mr. Moore, a master of the art of marketing by controversy, is now moving his marketing campaign, and some of its controversy, onto the intertubes.

Moore has created a YouTube group where he hopes Americans will upload videos of their health-care horror stories, which Moore says he will review and then bring before Congress. Mr. YouTube goes to Washington? Already there have been about a dozen video responses posted, and Moore’s initial video post (embedded above) has made it to the “Most Viewed (overall)” section.

This isn’t the first time that Moore’s SiCKO has rippled through the YouTube community. Another one of his promotional videos for SiCKO also moved through the “Most Viewed” section for a while as it collected a huge amount of traffic from, of all places, PerezHilton.com.

But with all things Michael Moore there must be controversy. Moore traveled to Cuba to film parts of his film and his illegal Caribbean excursion has gotten him a lot of press. Fred Thompson, the “stealth presidential candidate,” has been exchanging strongly worded essays with Mr. Moore, with their dialog spanning the National Review and the Drudge Report.

Then Mr. Thompson one-upped the supposedly media-savvy Moore by taking the debate to YouTube and dismissing Mr. Moore with a cigar chomp and a leather chair twirl (video embedded below).

Promoting major films on YouTube is a standard practice — as is YouTube drama. Bringing the two together just seems to make sense, and Michael Moore is definitely the man for the job. We’ll see if the our national legislators will sit through all of those videos Moore hopes to collect.