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Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism 3 out of 5 stars Director: Robert Greenwald
Give the boys and girls of Fox News points for pure chutzpah. It takes well-proportioned cojones to make "fair and balanced" the buzzwords of your news operation while you consistently demand that broad segments of the population recuse themselves from the national dialogue. "Outfoxed" includes a hilariously long montage of interruptions, "shut up"s and mic-cuttings perpetrated by Fox commentators against guests who commit the offense of holding their own in an argument. I don't recall Edward R. Murrow or Walter Cronkite ever doing this kind of thing, but these are shrill times, and if Bill O'Reilly is who we're stuck with, maybe we deserve no better.
"Outfoxed," a concise summary of the case against Red America's preferred 24-hour news channel, is the latest in a series of quick and dirty video pamphlets created by Robert Greenwald in association with MoveOn.org and the Center for American Progress (others include "Unprecedented," about the 2000 Florida recount, and "Uncovered: The War in Iraq"). It's available for order on DVD at www.outfoxed.org, has had record-breaking theatrical openings in select cities and is now expanding to others, including Austin.
Yet, I have to [must] wonder if anyone who turned out for those record-breaking openings didn't already believe that Fox News is full of crap. That'd be a shame, because "Outfoxed" is a well-argued, civil documentary - very unMoore-ish, in other words. Through interviews with media analysts and former employees, Greenwald builds the case that Fox News isn't simply "biased" but has become the broadcast apparatus of the Republican Party, faithfully reproducing talking points and keeping its journalists strictly on-message.
Consider the case of Larry Johnson, the former CIA operative and Fox News contributor who was released from his contract for suggesting that invading Iraq might divert resources from the hunt for al-Qaida. Or the fact that 83 percent of the partisan guests on Brit Hume's show are Republicans. Or the memo from news chief John Moody instructing reporters not to dig too deeply into intelligence failures in the Bush administration. Or Carl Cameron, who served as Fox's senior campaign reporter in 2000 even though his wife was a highly-placed Bush campaigner. There are more examples, each compelling and served straight-up.
"Outfoxed" does make some rhetorical miscalculations. Greenwald should have given a breakdown of Fox's programming to clarify which shows purport to be news and which are editorial. He spends too much time on Bill O'Reilly, considering that O'Reilly has already been thoroughly critiqued elsewhere.
And shouldn't Greenwald be aiming for people who actually watch Fox News because they've caught the "liberal media" meme? If you want to change their minds, you have to demonstrate that Fox's partisanship and message control are especially egregious. Greenwald compares the Carl Cameron case to that of a CNN producer who was disallowed from covering the campaign because her husband was a Gore team lawyer, but that's it. The unique nature of Fox's distortions has been well-documented, so why not include some of those findings here?
So, "Outfoxed" is likely to remain a solid video counterpart to books by people like Eric Alterman, David Brock and Al Franken. Which means we'll soon get a video counterpart to books by people like Ann Coulter. Oh, joy. Maybe in a year or two, when all us Red or Blue Americans are bored of talking to ourselves, we'll be able to talk to each other again.
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