Tech News
Google blogger slams Michael Moore’s Sicko
By Stevie Smith
Jul 3, 2007, 13:32 GMT

No stranger to controversy with his own particular brand of movie making, Michael Moore and his latest offering, Sicko, have this week come under fire from Google blogger Lauren Turner in a piece titled "Does negative press make you Sicko?"

Turner, writing in Google’s new Health Advertising Blog, openly chides Moore’s new investigative documentary by saying that it "attacks health insurers, health providers and pharmaceutical companies by connecting them to isolated and emotional stories of the [health] system at its worst." She also goes on to accuse Moore of portraying the medical and pharmaceutical industries as being "money and marketing driven" while failing to focus in on "interest in patient well-being and care," throughout the film.

A related Forbes report relays that Turner has suggested health care companies battle criticisms levelled at the industry by Moore’s latest movie by investing in Google ads to be shown over "Sicko" search results. However, this has not been well received by the blog community. Moreover, Google has been accused of "pandering" to the health care insurance industry despite Turner offering up another blog entry insisting that her comments (on an official corporate blog) in no way reflected Google’s views on the subject.

While not written on a personal blog, with no such disclaimer, Turner’s presently spot lit criticism of Sicko doesn’t help Google in terms of scrutiny of its closely formed relations with corporate advertisers or the validation of its usage of various blogs – both those that are official or personal to its staff members – in the convenient delivery of PR.

For example, Forbes outlines that numerous high-ranking members of the Google team have supposedly personal blogs that state written views are their own and not Google’s, although those views lend themselves to rallying behind the search engine giant in contentious legal issues. 

A senior software engineer at Google writes a hugely popular personal blog that explains official decisions made by the search behemoth and has also openly criticised a recent report highlighting concerns with Google’s privacy policy while illustrating privacy issues related to rivals Yahoo! and Microsoft.

"They'll get news out through a personal blog, so that it doesn't carry as much weight and attention," comments Danny Sullivan, search industry analyst and fellow blogger. "There are cases where these bloggers have definitely been cooperating with Google PR."