Review: Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s War on Journalism

Finally someone gets to respond to O’Reilly without being told to shut up.

Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s War on Journalism
Photo: MoveOn.org

Anyone who channel surfed through the Democratic National Convention probably noticed the FOX News Channel’s sketchy and selective coverage of the event. While you can expect a normal TV station to book figures like George Stephanopoulos for their perspectives on the DNC, the best FOX could come up with was a campaign manager for 1988 presidential hopeful Mike Dukakis, a “loser” that FOX on-air personalities have repeatedly gone out of their way to compare to John “French” Kerry.

Under the command of right-wing monopolist Rupert Murdoch and CEO Roger Ailes, a former media consultant to Nixon and Reagan, the “fair and balanced” news delivered on FOX everyday makes no distinction between objective reporting and commentary. A grassroots exposé by Robert Greenwald, Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s War on Journalism, arrives in theaters with the help of MoveOn.org and looks to appeal to anyone who’s ever wanted to hogtie Bill O’Reilly to a chair and beat the living shit out of him with a poker stick.

Though somewhat redundant after Robert Kane Pappas’s Orwell Rolls in His Grave, which likened our media system to a subsidiary of our country’s corporate process, Outfoxed is equally low-fi in the aesthetics department but is nonetheless effective in undermining the no-news-all-screaming FOX News Channel—an adjunct of the Republican party that helped George W. Bush seal his presidency—and giving it a taste of its own medicine. Don’t expect to find out why the decibel levels on the channel continue to remain so high, but with the help of interviews from media experts and eye-opening smoking guns (from revealing internal memos to appearances by former FOX employees), Greenwald collects and pieces together the channel’s countless consumer frauds and offenses for those who are too tired to keep count. Finally someone gets to respond to O’Reilly without being told to shut up.

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 Cast: Douglas Cheek, Jeff Cohen, Walter Cronkite, Peter Hart, Bob McChesney, Chellie Pingree, Bill O'Reilly, Rupert Murdoch  Director: Robert Greenwald  Distributor: MoveOn.org  Running Time: 78 min  Rating: NR  Year: 2004  Buy: Video

Ed Gonzalez

Ed Gonzalez is the co-founder of Slant Magazine. A member of the New York Film Critics Circle, his writing has appeared in The Village Voice, The Los Angeles Times, and other publications.

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