Michael Moore slams CNN's Sandy coverage to Piers Morgan

Filmmaker Michael Moore appeared on Piers Morgan's CNN show, "Piers Morgan Tonight" on Wednesday and told the host that he thought that CNN's coverage of Hurricane Sandy was badly done. The network, he said, needs fewer "reporters standing in waist-high water, seeing if they're going to be blown over" and more "real reporting."

Moore and Morgan were both in New York City for the hurricane and even though Moore said he found much to disparage in CNN's approach to reporting on the storm, he did watch the network as Sandy came ashore. His main question, he said, watching the coverage, was, "Why is CNN trying to kill Ali Velshi?"

Morgan disagreed, saying that he felt the network did a splendid job, and that reporting like Velshi's has value in that it gives viewers a real sense of the severity of the storm and keeps them from going out in the weather and risking their lives.

"It's a dramatic image that fully tells the story of just how big this is and how devastating," he said. "If it saves one life, is it worth it?"

"Yeah, well," Moore countered, "there's a lot of things you could do on CNN if you wanted to save any lives, but we can do that on another show."

He went on to discuss the blaze on the Rockaway peninsula that destroyed more than 110 homes. CNN, he said, didn't have any coverage of that as it was happening. Morgan had to concede the point that the story was only covered by the network hours later.

What purpose does it serve, asked Moore, to keep returning, "hour after hour after hour" to the Velshi standing in the same three feet of water, getting blown around by the wind?

"I think he was incredibly courageous to do what he did," Morgan disagreed. "It was exceptionally testing. He was there for twelve hours, showing you, as we can see now, just how desperate these conditions were."

Watch the video, embedded via CNN, below: