OPPapers.com

Michael Moore

His life:
Michael Moore was born at St. Joseph Hospital in Flint, Michigan, and grew up in the city of Davison a suburb of Flint. At the time, Flint was home to many General Motors factories, where his mother was a secretary, and both his father and grandfather were auto workers. His uncle was one of the founders of the United Automobile Workers labour union and participated in the famous Flint Sit-Down Strike.
Moore, an Irish American, was brought up a Roman Catholic and attended a Diocesan seminary at age 14. He then attended Davison High School, where he was active in both drama and debate , graduating in 1972. That same year, he ran for and won a seat on the Davison school board on a platform based on firing the high school's principal, John B McKenna, and vice principal, Kanje Cohen. By the end of his term both had resigned.
Moore is also an Eagle Scout, the highest rank awarded by the Boy Scouts of America, an achievement of which he is still very proud. For his Eagle Project, he filmed a documentary pointing out various safety hazards and issues within his community.
After dropping out of the University of Michigan-Flint (where he was majoring in fictional influences in literature and wrote for the student newspaper entitled The Michigan Times), at 22 he founded the alternative weekly magazine The Flint Voice, which soon changed its name to The Michigan Voice. In 1986, when Moore became the editor of Mother Jones, a liberal political magazine, he moved to California and the Voice was shut down. In 2003, the Star-Ledger printed an opinion piece by Paul Mulshine where he quoted Paul Berman who stated that Moore had been fired, following a series of clashes with people on the magazine's staff, which included a dispute over Moore's refusal to publish an article by Berman that was critical of the Sandinistas' human rights record, a piece the magazine, before Moore's arrival, had commissioned. Moore later sued for wrongful dismissal, seeking $2 million. He...