Michael Moore, everyone’s favorite liberal talking head (or least favorite, kind of your call), has announced that on September 23rd he will be releasing his latest movie Slacker Uprising for free via fledgling video site blip.tv. Mashable thinks that Moore is pulling a Radiohead, personally, I think that Moore is trying to get his name back in the papers.

Give ‘Em Moore

Moore has been oddly silent during this election cycle, he hasn’t come after the GOP like he normally does during a campaign year. He has been critical of both Hilary Clinton and Barack Obama (for their acceptance of Healthcare industry donations), which puts uber-liberal Moore in an odd situation. He has posed questions about John McCain’s heroism (or courage, or whatever he wants to call it), and now, all of a sudden, he announces that he is giving away his newest movie in an effort to get kids out to vote.

Moore has always done well in the social news sector, digg has always been kind to him (as it’s denizens have an apparent penchant for conspiracy theory), and I’m sure his videos on YouTube are viewed fairly regularly. And though he did show up on Keith Olbermann’s show a week ago, he hasn’t gotten much airtime since Sicko came out last year. Michael Moore, just a short time out from being the darling of the liberal media (on and offline), is all of a sudden scrambling for publicity.

Sure, he calls it a “gift to the fans”, but that’s awfully hard for me to believe. This man has made some of the most successful documentary films of all time, if Slacker Uprising is of the same caliber as Bowling for Columbine, Fahrenheit 9/11, and Sicko why wouldn’t he release it to theaters? The only thing I can think of is that the movie sucks and he figures that he can still get some press off the backs of social media users. After all, this is the first election where social media has truly been a part of the process, from the Congressional twitterings of John Culberson, to Barack Obama’s 72,000+ followers, social media has come into it’s own in this election, so why not jump on the bandwagon.

Honestly, I’ll probably download Moore’s movie for the same reason I downloaded In Rainbows, it was free. I’m not a big fan of Radiohead (I know, sacrilege, trust me, I’ve heard it before), nor am I a particularly big fan of Michael Moore, but if nothing else, at least this will bring some publicity to blip.tv, which is a pretty decent video service (even with it’s overly eclectic offerings). I’m surprised he chose blip.tv, but hey, good for them, but I agree with Stan Schroeder’s assessment, I really hope their servers can handle the traffic. Although, as of this writing the Mashable article has a mere 34 diggs, far from being worthy of the front page (the MSNBC article has almost 1,000).

The real thing I’m curious about is whether or not this will legitimize sites like blip.tv as distribution sources, and if this goes off without a hitch, will this become a way for these sites to not only monetize their current content, but to seek out new content from more well known filmmaker. Michael Moore, love him or hate him, pulls a lot of weight (no that’s not a joke about his size) when it comes to the entertainment industry. Hopefully this little publicity stunt of his will be an unintended boon for social media, regardless of whether or not his latest film is any good.

Greg Hollingsworth is a marketer and blogger who also writes about politics on Devil’s In The Details.

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