The Observer: Michael and me

"[Michael] Moore dropped out of university and, after stints as a hippie DJ, and a period running a crisis centre for teenagers, he set-up an alternative newspaper, the Flint Voice. He edited it with such verve, exposing corrupt officials and racist businesses, that in 1986 the San Francisco-based magazine Mother Jones asked him to become its editor. But just a few months after taking up the position, he was fired. According to the owner of the magazine, the staff said that he was impossible to work with. As far as Moore was concerned, he lost his job because he was set against a piece that was critical of the Sandinistas' record on human rights.
Either way, he won $58,000 damages in a suit for wrongful dismissal, sold his house and put all the money into making Roger and Me . The documentary was a notable critical, if not spectacular commercial, success. Thereafter Moore moved to New York and television, making zany political series such as TV Nation and The Awful Truth, which were full of Moore's trademark stunts designed to mock greed and ignorance and humbug.
Behind the scenes, however, a different picture was forming. Moore's employers were confronted with ever more regal demands. He insisted that Channel 4 house him at the Ritz when he worked in England on The Awful Truth, a fact he now portrays as the revenge of the working class against corporate might. Meanwhile employees grumbled. 'He's a jerk and a hypocrite and didn't treat us right and he was false in all of his dealings,' said one former worker. His former manager, Douglas Urbanski, has said that Moore 'was the most difficult man I've ever met... he's money-obsessed'."