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July 24, 2004
Bill O'Reilly, You Only Riling Me Up
I didn't attend one of the 3000+ MoveOn-affiliated parties that screened the new documentary Outfoxed this past Sunday. But a few days ago I got my own copy of the movie from Amazon, where it is somewhat surprisingly their top-selling DVD right now. If you haven't heard about Outfoxed, it's basically an in-depth exposé about Fox News and the extremely rightward tilt of their news coverage. One could posit that nobody really needed to watch a 77-minute movie to realize how "unfair" and "unbalanced" Fox's news coverage is, but even though I was already convinced that Fox News was a bunch of right-wing hacks, I was still pretty taken aback at some of the new things that I learned from this film. Because it's not just that the big Fox News personalities like Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity are completely partisan nutjobs who berate their guests, bullshit their way through arguments, and even make up lies to support their positions. Much more disturbing to me was all of the insider information about the internal workings of Fox News and the sophisticated and all-encompassing way in which the network's heavy pro-Republican tilt is explicitly coordinated and pushed from the very top levels. Through interviews with all sorts of former and current Fox staffers, Outfoxed shows how the Fox News "journalists" are told exactly what to cover and how to cover it. Detailed daily memos come down from Fox News chief John Moody explicitly dictating how the reporters, anchors, producers, and pundits should spin news about the Iraq War, the activities of Bush and Kerry, etc. Wonkette recently broke away from her sex-and-gossip obsession long enough to print the contents of about 30 of these Moody memos and they're definitely worth a read. A typical example:
"The president is doing something that few of his predecessors dared undertake: putting the US case for mideast peace to an Arab summit. It's a distinctly skeptical crowd that Bush faces. His political courage and tactical cunning are worth noting in our reporting through the day."
Fox reporters get in big trouble for breaking away from these directives or for doing things like asking challenging questions at Republican press conferences. Outfoxed also contains some disturbing segments on the obvious conflicts of interest that most real news networks purposefully avoid....things like the Fox News reporter who was assigned to cover Bush in 2000 while his wife was working on Bush's campaign....or the now-infamous Fox News pollster/first-cousin-of-Bush who analyzed the too-close-to-call Florida data on Election Night 2000 and decided to go ahead and call the election for Bush, leading the other TV networks to jump the same gun and endowing Bush with an initial sense of undeserved legitimacy that Gore never overcame. I rarely watch Fox News so I used to naively think that it was just an extremely right-leaning network that went out of its way to try and represent that side of political opinion that was supposedly getting ignored by the supposedly "liberal" media. Now I'm starting to realize that Fox is an extremely sophisticated 1984-like propaganda unit that is doing everything possible to advance the causes of the conservative wing of the Republican Party. In that light, this MoveOn ad comparing Fox to the Communist Party newspaper Pravda is actually much less far-fetched than it may initially seem. Anyway, if you haven't already seen it, watch Outfoxed. It's only $10 plus shipping via mailorder. Or I'll be happy to loan my DVD to anyone who lives in the Carrboro/Chapel Hill/Durham vicinity.
Speaking of news, spin, and media criticism.....how completely brilliant and hilarious was Jon Stewart's recent explanation of "talking points" and "conventional wisdom"? And how bizarre is it that a "fake news show" like The Daily Show has been totally outdoing its "real" counterparts when it comes to asking the hard questions and promoting critical thinking among its viewers? The Daily Show has been just about the only show keeping me from cancelling my cable subscription this summer.
Posted by Tim at July 24, 2004 02:55 PM
Comments
Oh, oh, oh! Me! Can I borrow the DVD?
Posted by: robin at July 25, 2004 09:21 PM
from the very beginning i always knew that was something not too kosher about fox.
can i be put on the list too?
thanks
Posted by: cia at July 25, 2004 09:46 PM
I loaned mine to Joe & Jo's in Durham. Joe said he'd be playing it pretty often, so anyone in that part of town should drop by and check it out if you haven't seen it yet.
Paul
Posted by: Paul at July 26, 2004 09:29 PM
tim, i'd love to borrow outfoxed, too. better yet, though, we should try to do a potluck/showing. maybe we could have a potluck in hell (sounds appetizing, eh?)
peace,
phaedra
Posted by: phaedra at August 2, 2004 04:17 PM
I've seen that bumper sticker comparing pravda to fox. it's ridiculous. Pravda was an organ of the soviet government. Fox is not sponsored, controlled or financed by the United States governnment. Beyond that everything it does and says is protected by the first amendment except perhaps moveon.org's point that the use of the term "fair and balanced" is indeed grossly misleading. teh edge we liberals have on republicans is that we use our brain. please don't fall for stupid slogans like that.
Posted by: nora at October 4, 2004 11:19 PM
Well, I agree with you that the two are not directly equivalent but as I said in my initial post, I think many of the things we have learned about Fox make it "much less far-fetched than it may initially seem". Maybe the point of the analogy is to bring up a frightening polar extreme and make people question Fox much more critically now so that it never gets to that level. Also, it's too easy to just say that "Fox is not sponsored, controlled or financed by the United States governnment". Of course, Murdoch and company are much sneakier than that. It's clear that some of the interests that sponsor, control, and finance Fox are also some of the same powerful interests that lobby, finance, and control the government in various ways. And they certainly care about how certain govt. actions are perceived by the public. Some of the same general principles of propaganda...just a much more nebulous decentralized capitalistic environment for it.
Thanks, though, I always appreciate thoughtful commentary!
Posted by: Tim at October 5, 2004 02:19 AM