Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War On Journalism (DVD)
APPROX. 80 MINS. - PROD. YEAR: 2004 - MPA RATING: NR
" O’Reilly comes under particular fire for frequently and loudly telling his interviewees to shut up, for cutting off their mikes or ending an interview when he doesn’t like what his guest is saying, and for humiliating those he really disagrees with.
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Robert Greenwald is the Roger Corman of documentary producers. In addition to producing "Outfoxed", he also made his "Un-" series - "Uncovered: The War on Iraq", "Unprecedented: the 2000 Election", and "Unconstitutional: The War on Our Civil Liberties". He makes these documentaries with political donations (the progressive organization moveon.org is one of his key supporters, as well as MediaChannel.org, Free Press, and Working Assets), churning the films out in record time, and completely reversing the ´normal´ mode of distribution by handing out up to 100,000 copies on DVDs for free to members of moveon.org, selling the DVDs in stores for less than $10 apiece, then broadcasting them on public television and after that going for theatrical releases in art houses all over the country.
"Outfoxed" brought to television the question of corporate ownership of the media and the conflict of interests it entails. It aims to show that the Fox Channel News is "less about news and more about punditry" and in fact is a mouthpiece for the Bush administration.
The ´making of´ featurette shows the process Greenwald and his team followed to arrive at their conclusions: a small army of monitors, all women, from all over the country, volunteered to watch Fox News for five months straight, keeping detailed records of what they watched. Meanwhile Greenwald´s team recorded Fox News every day. At the end of the five months the records were used as guides to select moments from Fox News to highlight in the documentary. These highlights were used to illustrate the key points made by the assortment of media experts, including Walter Cronkite, Jeff Cohen from (FAIR), Bob McChesney (Free Press), Chellie Pingree (Common Cause), Jeff Chester (Center for Digital Democracy) and David Brock (Media Matters) and numerous former employees of Fox News, some of whom kept their identities concealed out of fear of reprisals.
Watching the documentary only confirms what even a casual viewer of Fox News can observe for themselves: Fox News is heavily biased in favor of the current Republican administration and George W. Bush in particular. The journalists at Fox News, even those who want to, are not allowed to do the job that journalists should be doing in this country, but instead are carefully directed to delete portions of Kerry campaigns speeches that deal with the war in Iraq, to turn non-events into events, such as a Reagan birthday party at the Reagan library that wasn´t, and to create a culture of fear (fear of terrorism for example) at every opportunity. O´Reilly comes under particular fire for frequently and loudly telling his interviewees to shut up, for cutting off their mikes or ending an interview when he doesn´t like what his guest is saying, and for humiliating those he really disagrees with, not just when they are on the air with him but for months afterwards, to the point where one guest (a young man whose father died at the World Trade Towers on 9-11 who then signed a petition against the war) wanted to sue him for defamation, as O´Reilly went out of his way to depict him as a traitor.
