Sunday Flicks Part I: Outfoxed (a.k.a. O'Reilly Is An Asshole Watch)

I spent a good chunk of yesterday watching two movies. The first was Robert Greenwald's Outfoxed, the documentary of "Rupert Murdoch's war on journalism." Before seeing the film, but excited about the prospect of an anti-FNC movie, I sort of reccomended it here. I have to qualify that recommendation now. Perhaps I don't know exactly what I was expecting, but I found Outfoxed rather underwhelming.

The trouble starts from the outset of the film. It basically declares immediately that the producers couldn't decide if they wanted to do a film about Fox's violations of journalistic ethics or about the problems of corporate consolidation of the media. The result was noticeably schizophrenic, and the film concluded with a yawn-inducing segment about how we all need to "let our voices be heard" and "stand up to power" and "have a voice" and "confront the powerful" and "take a stand" and "we shall overcome" and "arise ye workers of all nations" and "blah blah blah blah blah shut the fuck up I get it already blah blah blah blah blah."

Since I didn't watch Outfoxed to get a lecture on corporate media regulation, I'll just stick to the parts that directly concerned Fox News Channel. And in that area, Greenwald did at least well enough to make the film worth watching. The link at the top of this post provides access to the John Moody memos that document how Fox deliberately propagandizes on behalf of conservative and (more importantly) Republican causes while hiding behind the cover of objective news presentation and "fair and balanced"-ness. The film itself mostly consists of interviews with former Fox employees who basically all tell the same story about being cajoled into slanting their coverage in order to support the Republican party.

One of the more damaging clips featured a former graphics engineer at Fox who said that the job of the Fox graphics team, in part, was to play with images in order to make liberals and Democrats look bad, and---here's a shocker---they never did anything of the kind to conservatives or Republicans. One of the funnier clips, this time including actually Fox News footage (which was unfortunately underplayed in order to give more time to the interviews) featured a former reporter who was sent to Simi Valley California to cover Ronald Reagan's birthday several years ago, and didn't find much of a celebration going on when he got there. He clearly did his best to play up whatever festivities were taking place, and still got in trouble with his bosses for not doing enough.

The Fox formula, which Outfoxed is quite good at delineating, is extreme conservative bias, to the point of distorting news, which is masked by tabloid style presentation, which is in turn glossed over by the pin-striped "how dare you insult my professional integrity" seriousness of Brit "pompous pseudo-intellectual piece of shit douchebag" Hume, who is amazingly talented at looking and sounding like a member of the Tom, Peter, and Dan club of anchormen. Greenwald was able to find a simply outrageous statistic about Hume's nightly news broadcast; in a seven month period in 2003, 83% of the guest for Hume's recurring interview segments with political VIPs were Republicans, compared with 17% Democrats. It gets even worse, though. Many if not most of the Democrats were moderates and centrists who were basically brought on in order to "courageously" side with the Republicans on some issue. In fact, I can remember one such interview several years ago with John Edwards, who as you may recall, used to be considered a rather moderate Democrat until he became a lib-ruhl tri-uhl loy-yer.

Of course, Outfoxed is complete with some obligatory O'Reilly Is An Asshole moments. Early on, we see a clip of him claiming to have only once told someone on his show to "shut up," followed immediately by at least a dozen instances of him telling various people, including live guests, to shut up. He actually seems to love the phrase the way that some people love drugs. Later, we see a summary of the infamous Jeremy Glick encounter (told, of course, from Glick's point of view). Let me just state for the record that the "Not In Our Name" campaign (which Glick was involved in) was moronic, and that the war in Afghanistan, as flawed later governance of the country may have been, was a just war. However, anyone who saw the interview saw O'Reilly behaving reprehensibly, and Glick's very plausible story about the fireworks after the cameras stopped rolling (I'm not sure what sort of corroboration Glick has, although no one at Fox News has ever denied it) suggests that O'Reilly is dangerously mentally imbalanced. In Outfoxed, there are several clips of O'Reilly simply inventing stories about what Glick said on air, making Glick out to be a lunatic and possibly an al-Qaeda sympathizer. Just the other day, when O'Reilly laid out his challenge to the New York Times, he claimed that Glick had to be escorted out of the building by security. That's techincally true; Glick says that security asked him to leave because they were worried that O'Reilly would do something violent if he saw Glick; and indeed, anyone who actually saw Glick on the air would have an awfully hard time believing that he became belligerent after the taping stopped.

After going through the Glick sequence, Al Franken appears on screen, saying that Glick had asked him if he could sue O'Reilly for defamation. Franken put Glick in touch with the attorney who worked on Franken's case against the Fox News Channel. The attorney advised that it would be a difficult case to win, since Glick would have to prove that O'Reilly knowingly lied, and O'Reilly's history of lying crazily and pathologically could therefore shield him from having to pay indemnities. Personally, I really wish Glick had carried on with the suit, so that O'Reilly would have been forced to choose between admitting to be a pathological liar or else paying off Glick for knowingly defaming him.

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Nothing in Outfoxed is shocking or surprising. Maybe that statement is a reflection of just how much the news media have deteriorated or just how cynical the public has become. Those, by the way, are mutually reinforcing phenomena. Greenwald's film is worthwhile, but not essential viewing.