Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism (2004)

Bush TV

By Rob Blackwelder, SPLICEDwire

Buy Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism on DVD.

The most scrupulous, most focused, most thorough, and arguably most important of 2004's wave of activist documentaries, Outfoxed exposes in detail the relentless partisanship and repetitive propaganda at Rupert Murdoch's Fox News by using the network's own program footage (and former employees) to corroborate its every assertion.

Director Robert Greenwald sets the stage with a primer on Murdoch's iron grip on his worldwide media empire, and the tycoon's hiring of a Nixon/Reagan/Bush media strategist to run his news network. Then the film introduces internal memos instructing anchors on how to put a pro-Bush spin on each day's events, and provides interviews with reporters and newsroom managers who quit rather than compromise their journalistic integrity -- some of whom clearly fear retaliation.

And that's just in the first six minutes.

Outfoxed is a far more unimpeachable documentary than Fahrenheit 9/11, the Karl Rove exposé Bush's Brain and even Greenwald's own Uncovered: The War On Iraq because it lacks anything that could be dismissed as supposition or hyperbole. The director mostly lets Fox's own on-air personalities prove themselves insolent and biased beyond a reasonable doubt in clip after clip after clip.

The film dissects the network's ingrained techniques for slanting news: anchors parroting White House talking points, repeating fear-mongering phraseology and espousing unattributed "some people say..." reporting. It scrutinizes how polite, low-profile liberal panelists are constantly and deliberately overmatched against attack-dog "name" conservatives; it exposes how reporters have been pulled from Republican beats for asking tough questions; and it demonstrates the frequency with which talk show guests are denied their say, often by interrupting or telling them to "shut up," but sometimes by flat-out turning off their microphones.

The biggest bombshell of Outfoxed is a shocking demonstration of conflict-of-interest: pre-interview footage, from the cutting room floor, of the network's senior reporter on the 2000 campaign speaking warmly with Bush about the reporter's wife -- one of the candidate's major fund-raisers.

Greenwald captures all this yellow journalism with evident frustration, but the film does not have a palpable liberal slant. Outfoxed simply makes it clear as a bell how Fox viewers have become -- according to a highly respected University of Maryland/Program on International Policy Attitudes study that asked viewers simple questions with undisputed answers -- the most misinformed in the nation.

DVD Details: Unfortunately, the accompanying 30-minute making-of featurette does the film a huge disservice by over-praising the partisan MoveOn.org and introducing the transparently, stereotypically lefty volunteers who accumulated all the hours of Fox News broadcasts used in the film. Pulling back this curtain cannot change the facts of Outfoxed, but it could provide corollary ammunition for naysayers.

Starring: Douglas Cheek (narrator)
Directed by: Robert Greenwald
Running Time: 107 minutes
MPAA Rating: NR
Date: July 13, 2004