Outfoxed

[Guest guest]

http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/features/story.jsp?story=549419

 

Outfoxed:

 

The movie that bit back at Murdoch's TV station

Republicans reign on Fox News, while Democrats are

pilloried. Now a modest film hitting out at this

imbalance is proving a big success. Andrew Gumbel

reports

09 August 2004

 

A few months ago, John MacArthur, the publisher of

Harper's magazine, was invited on to an American

television show to defend his argument that President

George Bush should be impeached. Except this was not

any television show. He was to be questioned on a

programme on Rupert Murdoch's Fox News network called

Hannity & Colmes. And that, as anyone familiar with

the gladiatorial style of America's most

unapologetically right-wing cable station knows, was

tantamount to putting his head in a lion's mouth and

just waiting for the fangs to sink in.

 

Mr MacArthur would have argued, had he been given the

chance, that the President had lied " on a grand scale "

about the reasons for going to war with Iraq. But he

was not there to explain himself. He was there, like

countless guests before and since, to be ridiculed and

humiliated, as a perverse form of public

entertainment.

 

Before he had uttered a word, Sean Hannity, the attack

dog on the interviewing team, dismissed his thesis as

" not even really intellectually worth discussing " .

When that provoked a testy response, he goaded his

guest further. " Name me one lie! Name me one lie! " Mr

MacArthur tried to oblige, but within seconds of his

launching into the now-familiar catalogue (the canard

of Iraq's nuclear weapons, the aluminium tube

imbroglio, and so on), Hannity cut him off, saying:

" We don't have time for a speech. "

 

The exchange soon deteriorated into a peculiar mixture

of inquisitorial baiting and unintentional black

humour. " I've got to ask you, " Hannity said. " Did you

call for the impeachment of Bill Clinton? " " I wasn't

interested in the impeachment of Bill Clinton. " " You

weren't interested? So, you're only interested in the

impeachment of Republicans? " Mr MacArthur stood up

well to this barrage, squeezing in more points about

dead US soldiers and betrayal of the public trust

until Hannity finally snapped and told him: " Be

quiet. "

 

Hannity summed up, no longer referring to his guest in

the second person " The idea here is he cannot give a

specific example. " " I did give a specific example, " Mr

MacArthur countered. " He's full of crap, " said

Hannity. " I did give an example, " Mr MacArthur

repeated. But Hannity was having none of it. " Hatred

of George W Bush now has become a sport for these

guys, " he thundered. And that was the end of that.

 

It is hard to watch such exchanges - similar ones are

broadcast on Fox News most nights of the week -

without being overwhelmed by queasiness, the sense

that they overstep the bounds of conventional

journalism into something much more sinister. It is

one thing to have an editorial slant, questionable

though that may be for a station purporting to be

" fair and balanced " in its reporting of the news; it

is quite another to bludgeon viewers with the party

line and deride or dismiss everything else out of

hand.

 

Sean Hannity is probably the station's most aggressive

cheerleader for the Bush administration, but he is far

from the only one. The station's top-rated host, Bill

O'Reilly, is notorious for his short fuse with guests

he feels he can get away with humiliating. On numerous

occasions he has told them to " Shut up " , or else

referred to them as " pinheads " or, on one occasion, a

" vicious son of a bitch " .

 

Even the straight up-and-down news coverage on Fox

strays deep into partisan territory. The anchors are

reverential and often openly supportive when the

subject-matter is President Bush's latest speech, or a

group of US Marines returning from Iraq. Bad news for

the administration is either screened out altogether -

you will not catch Fox discussing military casualty

figures in Baghdad - or else spun wildly in the

Republican favour. Often, the news commentary will be

the same, word for word, in some cases, as the spin

coming out the White House communications office.

 

The Democrats are considered fair game for just about

every kind of abuse. Anchors have been known to joke

about how well John Kerry, the Democratic Party

presidential candidate, gets along with Kim Jong Il,

the North Korean leader. When some of the best recent

US job-growth figures came out in May, the Fox anchor

reported, as news, that " they're drinking the Maalox

[a powerful antacid] right out of the gallon bucket at

the Kerry campaign " .

 

Coverage of the recent Democratic National Convention

was eccentric, to say the least. While every other

cable news outlet was providing intensive coverage and

analysis of the speeches, Fox spent much of its time

scooping up trivial crime stories from around the

country. For the first two days, it showed barely any

live coverage of the speeches. Sean Hannity and Bill

O'Reilly moved their operations to Boston's Fleet

Centre for the duration, but used the time either to

engineer confrontations with their political nemeses

(a stand-off between O'Reilly and Michael Moore, the

muck-raking documentary maker, was particularly

memorable), or else to talk to the few Republicans

present and agree that the spectacle was a television

masquerade behind which lurked an extremist left-wing

agenda.

 

When complaints started coming into the station that

Fox, over and above its usual bias, was not doing its

job as a news channel, a highly defensive O'Reilly

explained that Fox was actually performing better than

its rivals because it was offering viewers

" perspective " , not " partisan propaganda " .

 

Media watchers in the United States have been

marvelling for years at the extraordinary rise of Fox

News, which among its many other attributes has been

extremely successful at attracting audiences and

forcing the other cable news stations - CNN and MSNBC,

in particular - to rethink their own strategies. Not

only have the other stations become more

confrontational, and more lurid, they have also skewed

markedly to the right. If Americans had no clue until

very late in the day that the Bush administration's

stated rationale for war in Iraq had collapsed, it was

largely because the television news stations, out of

deference to the official line, were not telling them.

 

But until recently, the singular status of Fox News as

the cathode-ray embodiment of the political party in

power had stirred relatively little mainstream debate.

That has now changed, thanks to the extraordinary

success and reverberating influence of a modest little

documentary that began to be distributed over the

internet a few weeks ago. The film, called Outfoxed:

Rupert Murdoch's War On Journalism, is the work of a

prominent left-wing Hollywood producer called Robert

Greenwald, who put it together at high speed in weeks,

under conditions of utmost secrecy to avoid

pre-emptive legal action.

 

The film's underlying thesis, that Fox has broken with

the journalistic ethic of fair political coverage and

deliberately blurred facts with partisan opinion,

seems, at first blush, so self-evident that one

wonders why it needed to be spelt out over 77 minutes

of screen time. But the evidence of recent weeks

suggests it did need to be said, and the reaction is

now palpable.

 

Released on DVD and distributed largely by the

anti-Bush grassroots website MoveOn, Outfoxed sold

100,000 copies in its first two weeks, was shown at

thousands of co-ordinated political house-parties

across the country and shot to the top of Amazon.com's

bestseller list. As of this weekend, it has found

cinematic distribution, showing in four cinemas in Los

Angeles, San Francisco, New York and Washington. If it

is successful there, it could break out more widely.

 

The lesson of this success, Outfoxed's producers say,

is that people do not watch television nearly as

critically as one might imagine. " Ordinary people

don't think of the Machiavellian impact of politics on

their lives, " Kate McArdle said. " When we say in the

film that the man who first called the [contested]

2000 presidential election for Bush was Bush's own

cousin, John Ellis, who was working for Fox News,

people gasp in disbelief. One would think most people

would know 90 per cent of what we put in the film, but

they don't. "

 

The film is at its most effective as a deconstruction

of what Fox News puts on the screen. It follows

talking-points from the White House, to the memos

distributed to staff at Fox, to what goes on the air,

and shows how extraordinarily similar they are. It

demonstrates how close coverage of President Bush is

station policy, as is the decision to offer only

filtered glimpses of the Kerry campaign. It reveals

certain specific linguistic prescriptions, such as the

term " sharpshooter " instead of " sniper " to describe US

soldiers picking off Iraqi targets in Fallujah.

Sharpshooter, a memo explains, does not have the same

negative connotation.

 

And the film offers an intriguing close syntactical

reading of the phrase " some people say " , which is

repeatedly used by Fox to cloak their own partisan

opinion in the language of reasoned analysis. Whenever

a fact inconvenient to the Bush administration pops

up, its source is denigrated and accused of political

motivations. Thus, when Richard Clarke, the

disillusioned former White House counter-terrorism

chief, offered his damning portrait of the Bush team's

stance on terrorism before 11 September, Fox

immediately denounced him as a liberal fruitcake

prepared to say anything to shift more copies of his

book Against All Enemies.

 

One of the film's interviewees, the veteran reporter

James Wolcott, says that Fox does not particularly

mind if such tactics look faintly silly. " They don't

have to win every argument, " Wolcott says, " but if

they can muddy the argument enough, if they can turn

it into a draw, that to them is a victory because it

denies the other side a victory. "

 

Naturally, Outfoxed itself has become an object of the

Fox spin machine, with numerous station employees

trying to scare people away rather than engage with

its arguments. O'Reilly, who comes off particularly

badly in a sequence in which he bullies the son of a

New York Port Authority worker who died on 11

September, has denounced it as " rank propaganda " and

the " distorted work of an ultra-liberal film maker " .

 

One Fox News reporter who confronted Robert Greenwald

at Outfoxed's launch news conference said: " It's

unfair, it's slanted and it's a hit job. And I haven't

even seen it yet. " Fox's complaints (including perhaps

the most persuasive one, that they were not given a

proper right of reply) might look more substantial if

they did not come from a station which keeps

insisting, ludicrously, on its own impartiality. " Fair

and Balanced, " the logo goes. " We report. You decide. "

O'Reilly describes his show as the " no-spin zone " .

 

But for all the indignation, Outfoxed appears to have

had a tangible effect on station policy. After a

deluge of complaints during the Democratic Convention,

Fox News started airing more of the speeches live in

the last two days. An informal group of media-watchers

inspired by Outfoxed has been monitoring Fox News

around the clock, and swears the station has been

inviting more bona fide liberals in the past couple of

weeks. Like everything else in America, the stakes of

this new media debate have been heightened by the

looming election.

 

Outfoxed takes its place alongside Michael Moore's

Fahrenheit 9/11 and Greenwald's previous film

Uncovered, in which intelligence and foreign policy

veterans pick apart the justification for the Iraq

war. And Fox has become part of the election-year

debate about the media and political spin.

 

Perhaps the most insidious thing about Fox News is the

sheer ignorance it engenders. An opinion poll last

October shows 33 per cent of Fox News viewers think

the United States has found weapons of mass

destruction in Iraq, when it has not, and 67 per cent

think Saddam Hussein had ties to al-Qa'ida, which the

recently published 9/11 Commission report concluded he

did not. The figures for listeners to National Public

Radio, America's equivalent to Radio 4, were 11 per

cent and 16 per cent respectively.

 

Not only are Fox News viewers often the least informed

news consumers, the poll shows. Alarmingly, they also

regard themselves as very well-informed. Anyone

wondering why it is so hard for Mr Kerry to pull away

from President Bush after the policy disasters of the

past few months should take note, and gird themselves

for an autumn propaganda war like no other.

 

Source: Independent