COMMENTARY -- Both the critics and the audiences have come out for Fahrenheit 9/11. Pulling in almost $22 million US in its first weekend, the film has set a record for a documentary.

Not surprisingly, the mainstream media has cast a skeptical eye on the left-leaning film. And U.S. conservatives are absolutely apoplectic about it. Check out Moorelies.com or Moorewatch.com to see what I mean.

Both the mainstream news media and conservative advocates have harped on inaccuracies in the film.

For context, remember that a month ago The New York Times ran an editor's note belatedly admitting that their coverage of Iraq's so-called weapons of mass destruction (WMDs)  had some serious flaws.

The Times used people like the now-discredited Iraqi exile Ahmad Chalabi as primary sources, then asked sources in the Pentagon (with whom Chalabi was working hand-in-glove and from whom his Iraqi National Congress was receiving $340,000 US per month) if what they were was saying was true.

It went beyond incompetence. Daniel Okrent, the paper's public editor, noted in his analysis of The Times's coverage that articles which were skeptical on the Bush administration's claims of Iraq's WMDs tended to be buried. Stories toeing the government line were given page-one treatment. Howell Raines, the former editor of  The Times, reportedly wanted to be thought of as "fair" by the Bush administration.

Do you remember reading much sustained public whipping of The New York Times over the mishandling of this issue? Probably not. And the reason is that virtually every other major news outlet in the United States was doing some variation of the same thing in the lead-up to the Iraq war.

It's important to know that challenging power in the U.S. has never been easy, despite occasional heroic achievements like the Washington Post's coverage of the Watergate scandal 30 years ago.

There was a three-part series written for the San Jose Mercury News in 1996 by Pulitzer-prize-winning reporter Gary Webb called Dark Alliance. Its basic thesis was that some Nicaraguan contras -- the group was essentially a CIA creation -- were involved in trafficking crack cocaine on the west coast of the United States in the 1980s to raise money for their war against the Sandinista government. Not only that, the CIA knew it and condoned it.

The CIA denied it, and the major U.S. papers directed their coverage towards proving Webb wrong and highlighting the presumed weaknesses that were in the reporting (to be fair, there were some). The Mercury News, after months of sustained pressure, ran an editor's note in May 1997 that an April 1998 Esquire magazine article sympathetic to Webb described as "an odd composition that retracted nothing but apologized for everything." Webb's career was ruined over the story, but Esquire claims he basically got it right.

Esquire quoted Senator John Kerry (who is now running for president) as telling The Washington Post, "There is no question in my mind that people affiliated with, on the payroll of, and carrying the credentials of, the CIA were involved in drug trafficking while involved in support of the contras." In 1989, Kerry had chaired a subcommittee of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that dealt with the contras and cocaine.

Let's move the discussion back to the present day. Would the major news outlets in the U.S. be serving their readers and viewers better by looking more closely, for example, at the relationship between the Bushes and the Saudis that is covered in Fahrenheit 9/11 (or in the Craig Unger book House of Bush, House of Saud)? Or is it by saying Moore has only asked questions, presented circumstantial evidence or produced a piece of hate propaganda?

If you choose to go see the movie, you'll be watching Moore's angry, funny, sometimes horrifying and heart-breaking satirical rant against Bush, someone he clearly regards -- rightly or wrongly -- as a doltish, lightweight frat boy.

He is scathing towards an administration that launched a war which, in the words of one businessman in the film, is "good for business, bad for people." Ten thousand dead Iraqi civilians might agree.

Watch Fahrenheit 9/11 with a critical eye and remember Moore's not trying to tell multiple sides of the story or be fair. And he unquestionably deserves a slap upside the head for some of the dumb things he says in the film.

However, ask yourself whether other media outlets show U.S. Marine recruiters behaving like pimps in economically depressed neighborhoods or maimed U.S. soldiers in military hospitals.

Similarly, ask yourself if the weapons of mass destruction didn't exist, then why did the U.S. invade Iraq? According to recent surveys, 57 per cent of Americans now think invading Iraq was a mistake.

Given the box office numbers, there seems to be some appetite in at least certain constituencies of the North American public to have these questions addressed.

I'll leave you with a snippet of an interview of Morgan Spurlock, director and star of the fast food documentary Super Size Me, with Salon.com:

Salon: With the success of Michael Moore's films and others, it seems like there is a growing trend of left-leaning, progressive, anti-corporate documentaries. Why is that?

Spurlock: I think that documentary is your last bastion for any truth today. It's the one place where you have no media conglomerate telling you what to say, the one place where people aren't going to put a vice on opinion and on fact. You can put something out that takes a stand and says, 'Listen, you need to know this.'