OUTFOXED: RUPERT MURDOCH'S WAR ON JOURNALISM - DVD review

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.

"Outfoxed" parodies many of Fox New's techniques to get its point across, especially the heavy reliance on a few pundits and the manipulative use of graphics with an emphasis on American flag style emblems and colors. But the final word belongs to the volunteer monitors, who are interviewed repeatedly, on camera or in conference phone calls, throughout the process. After a few months of watching hours of Fox News everyday several of them were on the verge of a nervous breakdown, one of them was so fearful she would not be identified, and all of them were extremely angry. As a result of the monitor's desire to continue doing something once their monitoring task was complete, the producers have links to various activist efforts, such as an effort to renew the Fairness doctrine and to ban Fox News from using the logo 'Fair and balanced' (see www.outfoxed.org).

"Outfoxed" was timed to be released at a key moment before the 2004 election (in fact, on July 6th, George W. Bush's birthday), with a stated goal of influencing the election outcome, but it is still worth watching now as it shows a clear, systematic method for analyzing news content and generally serves to alert us to the effects the consolidation of too many media outlets into one set of hands, such as Rupert Murdoch's.

Video:
Aspect ratio 1:33 to 1. Region 0.
Shot on video using a news-program format. The speed of production shows, with some underlit scenes and poorly composed framing of the Outfoxed production team segments. The interviews with the experts and the editing of the sequences from Fox News work well, however.

Audio:
Dolby Digital 2.0 mono. Songs like "Layla" and "Dirty Laundry", donated by their respective artists, are used to good effect.

Extras:
The DVD's Extras include
Making of featurette, which includes interviews with every member of the production team as well as the monitors.
Trailer for Uncovered.

A previous generation's logo was 'Question Authority'. Ours has to be 'Question the News'. Especially Fox News.