Outfoxed is a Robert Greenwald documentary that attempts to examine how media empires, led by Rupert Murdoch's Fox News, have been running a "race to the bottom" in television news and the dangers of corporations taking control of the news industry. While this is fairly well-trod ground for Wildfiring's readers or any fan of the Daily Show, it's still worth watching when you have some time.
The film, while not perfect, does a commendable job of stripping away the fair and balanced veneer and exposing the rotten underside of Fox - laying bare their techniques for undermining the left, distorting/ignoring facts to don't support their agenda, and squelching any dissent within the organization. It's troubling to watch Fox's own anchors make a mockery of the "We Report. You Decide" slogan with their unbridled commentary on their guests and the issues of the day. O'Reily's exchanges with Jeremy Glick, the son of a NYC port authority worker who had the gall to point out that we are reaping what the Bush family has sown with the training of the mojahedin, is particularly disgusting to watch. (On a side note, check out this clip of the Daily Show which highlights the recent Fox News special Donald Rumsfeld: Why He Fights. What a joke.)
I also love the part which shows in cold hard terms how Fox News viewers have fundamental misunderstandings of very basic factual issues. You can find the complete results of the PIPA poll here (it starts to get good on page 15). Check it out:
"Has the US found links between Iraq and al-Qaeda?"
- PBS-NPR viewers who say yes - 16%
- Overall US population who say yes - 48%
- Fox viewers who say yes - 67%
Where the documentary falls short is that it attempts to pin the problems with news overall on Fox - as if the creation of this network was single-handedly responsible for the current poor state of journalism. Grotesquely biased as they are, if anything Fox has increased the diversity in news - we now have 4 corporations spoon feeding us instead of 3 (and 10 times more stories about schools in Iraq). Fox cannot be blamed for the problems that come with 24-7 news availability, the decreased news cycle time, networks parroting each other, fear mongering, the advent of "infotainment", and cost-conscious/superficial journalism. These are issues larger than Fox and the documentary does a poor job of convincing me otherwise.
Overall, I had a very similar reaction to this film as I did to Greenwald's other famous work, Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price. He points out some big problems and generally reaffirms what I already know (Fox News and Wal-Mart suck a lot) while giving some great concrete examples of these things. The problem is he over-generalizes the role these organizations play in perpetuating the problem rather than taking the more nuanced approach I prefer of examining the problems facing journalism in the age of mass media or retail in the age of globalization and only then discussing specific companies as a subset of that. In that way Greenwald makes one of the same mistakes that he accuses Fox of making - going for the easy, one-sided story that panders to his base and not going deep enough.
0 comments:
Post a Comment