reviewed
by Jesse Walker |
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August
16 , 2004
| "Ronald Reagan's birthday was, for Fox News viewers, something
akin to a holy day," says former Fox anchor John Du Pre in Robert
Greenwald's documentary Outfoxed:
Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism. "So my assignment was
to go to the Ronald Reagan Library in Simi Valley, California, and
to do live shots from before dawn until dark." It was a tough assignment,
because there wasn't much to report: There weren't many people around,
and the closest there was to an organized celebration came when
a visiting fourth grade class sang "Happy Birthday."
The higher-ups were not pleased. "They saw my first two or three
live shots," Du Pre recounts, "and [news chief John] Moody called
in to say, 'What is he doing out there?' Apparently, my live
shots weren't 'celebratory' enough." As a result, Du Pre claims,
he was suspended.
Outfoxed is one of those documentaries that's most convincing
when it's telling us things we already know -- in this case, that
Fox blurs the line between the news pages and the op-eds, and that
the channel tilts heavily to the right. Viewers interested in seeing
those familiar points illustrated with amusing, horrifying, and
sometimes deeply strange anecdotes might enjoy the film, which includes
several stories like Du Pre's. There is also an already-infamous
segment -- perhaps the best part of the movie -- in which Fox's
Carl Cameron and future president Bush chat awfully amiably before
an interview during the last election; Cameron's wife, we learn,
was working for the same campaign her husband was covering. And
the film offers a solid summary of the Jeremy Glick affair, in which
Bill O'Reilly, the buffoonish host of The O'Reilly Factor,
"interviewed" a young man who had both lost his father on 9/11 and
subsequently signed an antiwar petition. O'Reilly berated Glick
rudely and, when the segment was over, he threw him out of the studio;
afterwards he told progressively less accurate descriptions of what
had happened until, 11 months later, he was claiming his guest had
accused the president of "knowing about 9/11 and murdering his own
father." (Glick had said no such thing.) The latter tale was well
known before the movie came out, but Outfoxed does a good
job of stitching together a tight and damning account of it.
Interspersed with this are arguments that are somewhat less impressive:
• Author John Nichols makes the bizarre claim that Fox News, by
being the first channel to prematurely call the 2000 election for
Bush, "had more to do with making George W. Bush president than
any recount or ballot design issue."
• A montage of Fox personalities dissing John Kerry mixes reporters
with commentators without telling us which is which. If you want
to demonstrate that Fox is biased when it's pretending to be balanced,
it doesn't do much good to show us the archconservative columnist
Cal Thomas accusing Kerry of being a liar. No one expects Thomas
to be objective.
• David Hnatiuk, formerly Fox's music supervisor, complains darkly
that the "Fox News alert," a flashy announcement that breaking news
is about to be reported, was invented to lead in dispatches from
the Columbine massacre but now announces trivial stories about Ben
Affleck and Jennifer Lopez. It's not entirely clear why this is
mentioned at all. I suspect the filmmakers think we're being conditioned
to mistake Bennifer for an important story while Bush and his cronies
get away with murder. To believe that, though, you have to believe
that viewers take the "Fox News alert" music and graphic at face
value, as opposed to seeing it as just another overwrought cable
news tick.
But the biggest problem with the movie is its message. "My criticism
of Fox News isn't that it's a conservative channel," the leftist
media critic Jeff Cohen declares at one point. "It's the consumer
fraud of 'fair and balanced.'" The filmmakers seem to believe that
the great American hordes take Fox's "fair and balanced" slogan
at face value. In the DVD's behind-the-scenes featurette, a woman
involved with the production says that "watching Fox...has totally
convinced me that the media is owned by these people and they're
brainwashing the American public." It's much more likely, though,
that the only people who believe Fox is unbiased are those who already
share its biases. The rest of us wouldn't be surprised if Brit Hume's
job was elevated to a cabinet-level position.
The more interesting issue is not the influence Fox has on its
audience, which is small as well as self-selecting, but the influence
it has on other media -- and, through them, on their audiences.
There's two ways a rival channel can adopt the Fox model of openly
opinionated news: to simply copy Fox, right-wing obsessions and
all, or to counterprogram from another political perspective. The
film includes an example or two of the first approach, but it does
not make a case that such copying is prevalent. Meanwhile, it suggests
that counterprogramming isn't going to happen, thanks to "the corporate
ownership of the other channels"; it punctuates the point by looking
at Phil Donahue's short-lived show on MSNBC. "By the end of our
tenure, balance [wasn't] enough," one of Donahue's former producers
remembers. "And this is the Fox effect. They mandated that if we
had two left-wing guests, we had to have three right-wing guests."
But even if you accept the idea that large corporations will never
underwrite radical criticisms of the status quo -- an assumption
that isn't necessarily true, to judge from the music industry --
there's still a significant ideological territory to the left of
Fox and to the right of Noam Chomsky. Maybe MSNBC is too spineless
to create a Fox News for liberals, but it's early, and other broadcasters
could still fill the gap. Already, Comedy Central has had tremendous
success with Jon Stewart's liberal (and frequently excellent) Daily
Show. (Not that Comedy Central's talk shows lean uniformly to
the left. The channel is also the home of the uneven but entertaining
Tough Crowd, whose conservative host Colin Quinn is smarter
and funnier than any of his counterparts on Fox.)
There's one more model for counterprogramming: Outfoxed
itself. As a movie, it isn't much to write home about -- it's amateurish
without being edgy, with a style that at times resembles a low-budget
corporate video. Worse yet, it sometimes feels as crudely manipulative
as the channel it's critiquing. (It's fine to show us John Moody's
sometimes damning memos to the Fox staff. But do you have to read
them aloud in that ridiculous faux-sinister voice?) Yet while the
film is mediocre, its distribution model is inspiring. Before it
was released to theaters across the country this month, over 50,000
copies of Outfoxed were sold on DVD. Thousands of activists
bypassed the multiplexes entirely by screening the picture at house
parties. Such grassroots networks -- along with the Internet, micro
radio, and other outlets for low-budget alternative media -- are
accessible to people of all political philosophies.
That's welcome news for anyone alienated from both the party-line
Republicans of Murdoch's news channel and the party-line Democrats
of MoveOn.org who financed this film. In the '90s, Fox was a scrappy
muckraker and MoveOn was a rigid defender of the White House. Under
Bush, the positions have reversed. Those of us who try to stay skeptical
no matter who's in power should be grateful for the expansion of
media options that's given us both Fox and Outfoxed.
bio:
Jesse
Walker is managing editor of Reason and author of Rebels
on the Air: An Alternative History of Radio in America (NYU
Press).
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