Charles Davis
Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s War on Journalism
This
past Friday Fox News’ lead political reporter, Carl Cameron, posted a
remarkable report of a Kerry rally the day after the debates containing enough
embarrassing quotes from Kerry to ruin any hopes of the presidency. In the report, Cameron quoted Kerry as
saying, “Didn't my nails and
cuticles look great? What a good debate!” followed up by the gems, "It's
about the Supreme Court. Women should like me! I do manicures," and then
stating, “I'm metrosexual — he's a cowboy,” referring to President Bush. Now it’s fairly likely that any one of
these quotes could be used in a successful ad campaign against Senator Kerry,
with most people confusing Kerry with some guy from “Queer Eye for the Straight
Guy” than a legitimate presidential candidate. It’s not hard to imagine some pictures of President Bush
strolling on an aircraft carrier in a flight suit – highlighting his stern
resolve – juxtaposed with John Kerry offering every woman in America to do
their manicures if he gets their vote.
There’s just one problem with Cameron’s story that just might prevent it
from being the political bombshell of the presidential campaign – John Kerry
never said any of the quotes Cameron attributed to him -- they were simply
fabricated. It’s incidents like
this, where the lead reporter on the Kerry campaign engages in clear
partisanship, that tend to infuriate Fox News’ critics, who say that the cable
news channel is provoking a race to the bottom in the way of journalistic
ethics. It’s this subject that
Robert Greenwald’s documentary “Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s War on Journalism,”
sets out address, and it contains some amazing clips of actual Fox broadcasts,
but the film itself is flawed, with all the good moment interspersing the
largely tedious rounds of largely liberal media critics.
Greenwald’s
film is at its best when it simply lets Fox speak for itself, with extended
segments of clips capturing what are often bizarre and blatantly partisan
statements taken directly from Karl Rove’s playbook. One such clip shows us one of the hosts of the morning
program “Fox and Friends” declaring matter-of-factly, “North Korea loves John
Kerry.” Another sequence shows how
Fox’s newsmen and women insert Republican talking points into the news by the
use of the all-purpose phrase “some people say.” Greenwald shows us dozens of such clips, where Fox reporters
throw ethics out the door and state things like “some people say John Kerry
looks French” and their favorite “some people say John Kerry is a
flip-flopper.” Inevitably the
phrase is used to insert statements that blur the line between the news and
commentary, and throw any journalistic standard of actually sourcing a quote
out the door, attributing the quote to an abstract “some people” as a means of
inserting the station’s own agenda.
Another clip shows us Fox News anchor Brit Hume reporting that there
have been 277 military deaths in Iraq, but that hey, that’s still lower than
the murder rate in California, complete with an accompanying graph. Unfortunately, the director doesn’t
effectively utilize the power of simply letting the Fox product speak for
itself, and sucks most of the life out of the film with an endless series of
commentaries from media watchdog groups that quickly wear the viewer’s patience
thin, as even the most ardent Fox-basher is likely to yell “enough already” as
commentator upon commentator bemoans Fox’s affect on real journalism.
A
successful documentary about Fox News should not be a hard thing to make. Whether it be a news anchor barely able
to contain their glee at images of “shock and awe” bombing campaigns over
Baghdad, or when the aforementioned Carl Cameron is seen in “Outfoxed” chatting
it up with President Bush in 2000 prior to an interview, jovially talking about
his wife with the candidate Bush, who just happens to know her personally as
she was actively campaigning for the President at the time – instances of bias
aren’t very hard to come by with Fox. Unfortunately, “Outfoxed” often times seems amateurish in its
production, and is bogged down by uncreative interviews with too many
critics. While the film does contain
some remarkable instances of blatant politicking on video, the rest of the film
doesn’t maintain the viewer’s interest, and the closing segment that encourages
the viewer to engage in activism as an answer to media bias seems tacked on and
clichéd.
It’s easy to get worked up about one conservative network and then forget the rest of media’s culpability in spreading poor journalism. After all, it was columns by the New York Times reporter Judith Miller that were filled with sensational claims about weapons of mass destruction leaked by anonymous security officials, all later proving to be false, that were then trumped up by the very same administration that was likely leaking the disinformation. And television journalism, if it can be called that, tends to be universally bad, regardless of whether it’s CNN or Fox, choosing hard-hitting material on Britney Spears’ love life over the harder, real journalism. The media is long over due for a scathing indictment from some intrepid director with a Tivo, but “Outfoxed” isn’t that film. Rupert Murdoch may be engaged in a war on journalism as the makers of the film state, but it’s a war that got started a long time before he came along.