Focusing on Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 911, which does not use original footage but rather appropriated materials, Faden comments upon the lack of critical engagement with the form of the film, even as many attacked Moore's bias. As this clip from Faden's piece shows, the one critic who engages the form of the film, Dave Kopel, notes Moore's bias but argues that it comes from the fact that Moore's voiceover accompanies a particular choice of footage that is not related, and forms an inferred argument though Moore has technically told the truth. Faden notes, "For Kopel, the film equals a deceit because viewers are unable to read the complex visual syntax of the film." Although Faden does not agree with Kopel's general analysis (see Kopel's Fifty-nine Deceits in Fahrenheit 9/11), his singular response reveals "a crisis of criticism, a crisis of media literacy." Indeed, the ability to layer images with voiceover, text, music and other visual effects, renders the visual and aural syntax of such films impossible to decode without specific emphasis on the form as well as the content of the argument. Gauging the veracity of these filmic texts becomes a hit-or-miss endeavor. 

This fact, above all, argues for using film footage as course texts in university classrooms. For if public knowledge is increasingly expressed in film, and if documentary as well as broadcast media continues to apply cinematic devices which are multi-layered and digitally altered, then the complex syntax of these filmic texts must be a matter of widespread concern. Its literacy must be taught if its veracity is to be gauged.