Filmmaker takes on Fox and its politics
By Elizabeth Jensen
Los Angeles Times
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| Robert Greenwald's film "Out-foxed" offers a withering critique of the Fox network.
Associated Press |
A coalition of liberal-minded groups, led by the political action organizers MoveOn.org, teamed to finance "Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism," Greenwald's new film that portrays the cable news and opinion channel as the prime example of what's wrong with media consolidation.
Working in stealth for six months, Greenwald pieced together allegations from former Fox insiders, memos from the network's editorial chief and extensive on-air clips taken from four months of taping the channel to lay out how Fox, in his view, aggressively promotes a Republican agenda.
His arsenal includes:
- A 2000 tape in which Fox News Channel's chief political correspondent Carl Cam-eron chats amiably with then-presidential candidate George W. Bush — just before interviewing him — about how much Cameron's wife is enjoying campaigning for the president-to-be. Such conflicts of interest aren't generally allowed at other media outlets. "My wife has been hanging out with your sister ..." Cameron tells Bush. "She's a good soul. She's a really good soul," Bush responds. The unaired footage that precedes the interview, billed as a "Fox News Exclusive," appears to have been pulled off a satellite feed. (Moore used such outtakes as a central motif of "Fahrenheit," as he sought to capture images of administration figures in unflattering moments.)
- Nine recent memos from John Moody, Fox's editorial chief, laying out how Fox's reporters and anchors are to discuss the day's news, including pro-administration developments they are to highlight, such as the economy's job growth.
- Former West Coast anchor Jon Du Pre talking about how reporters were praised when they took shots at Democrats and encouraged to report negatively on Jesse Jackson. The anchor also said he got in trouble because his coverage of a Ronald Reagan birthday celebration wasn't sufficiently enthusiastic.
- Fox clips juxtaposed with Republican talking points to show how news anchors and opinion commentators pound home a theme throughout a day, such as a sustained attack on former White House antiterrorism chief Richard A. Clarke and a humorous portrayal of presumptive Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry as "French." fair and balanced?
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Greenwald says his goal is that "everybody in America turns off Fox News, that they look at it and see it for what it is and then turn it off."
Almost from the minute Fox News Channel went on the air in 1996, critics have complained that the channel, the brainchild of News Corp. chairman Murdoch, distorts the news and promotes a conservative agenda. Fox, whose use of the motto "Fair and Balanced" particularly irritates critics, counters that it merely gives equal time to voices that it contends have a hard time getting heard on media outlets it considers liberal-biased.
Indeed, copies of the Moody memos — some provided to the Los Angeles Times by Greenwald's team and some independently obtained — appear to bend over backward to favor a Republican line, but they also show instances where Moody ordered the staff to play down, for example, criticism of Democratic candidate Kerry and to give Kerry and Bush equal time on days when both were delivering big speeches.
Patterns of bias
Greenwald originally wanted to look at the effects of media consolidation but soon decided to focus on Fox, he said. Eventually, he contacted more than 50 current and former Fox employees. He found people who had tough things to say about their former employer, including Clara Frenk, a Fox booker and producer in 1998-99, who talked about an anti-liberal bias, and former terrorism commentator Larry Johnson, who said he was dropped from Fox in January 2003, without explanation, after he made comments critical of the Bush administration.
But Greenwald didn't find what Fox critics have always hoped for, some kind of internal memo or a whistle-blower who would prove their case of bias unequivocally.
"There is no 'Watergate tape,'" he said, adding that Fox News executives are "very smart people; they don't give you the smoking gun." What he found instead, he said, is "patterns. You're not going to find one memo or one person. You look at a pattern."
Greenwald concluded from his research that Fox News is not so much conservative as Republican "partisan" and problematic because it has influenced other TV news channels that are envious of Fox's ratings success.
"Outfoxed" so far is slated for limited screenings and a DVD release, joins a spate of summer documentaries attacking the media. Among them are Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11," which contends that TV news has been too supportive of the Bush administration's foreign policies, and "The Hunting of the President," which criticizes decade-old coverage by newspapers, including the Los Angeles Times, of the Whitewater accusations that dogged President Clinton's White House.
"Outfoxed" also is the extension of a broad attack on the credibility of Fox News that has been building among many organizations in the last year. MoveOn.org, which also helped finance "Uncovered," has had what it calls a Fox News "monitoring" program since November, in which members are urged to write in with examples of Fox bias. Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, also a supporter of the film, has issued several reports questioning Fox reporting.
Prominent critics in the media include Los Angeles Times Editor John Carroll, who does not appear in the documentary, and Walter Cronkite, who does. "It was quite clear when they founded the Fox network that they intended to be a conservative organization," Cronkite says in the film, adding "beyond conservative, a far-right-wing organization."
The sustained criticism is reminiscent of the campaign that Accuracy In Media and other groups launched with some success against CBS News two decades ago, visible at sites such as RatherBiased.com.
