Robert Greenwald, “Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s War on Journalism” (2004)
An impassioned documentary intended to rouse its mainly American audience to action, “Outfoxed …” exposes in considerable and confronting detail how global media mogul Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News Channel has trashed and gutted TV news journalism and influenced US public opinion to the extent that the channel virtually aids and abets American foreign policy around the world with the most devastating effects on lives and long-term political / economic / cultural stability wherever it impacts. The documentary relies wholly on interviews with former Fox News employees and writers and on a wholesale download of Fox News reporting (potentially infringing on Fox News copyright) examples to build a very convincing if shrill case that Fox News operates as the propaganda arm of the US Republican Party and Fox News’s deleterious effect on journalism generally in the US and elsewhere where the American news media model has been adopted.
A brief history of the dark lord himself in animated still and titles from his first purchase of a newspaper in Adelaide back in the 1960s to his current domination of (and deep penetration into) the Anglophone news media flashes across the screen. Quickly the film gets stuck into the details of Murdoch’s thirst for power and influence wherever they lie: he sucks up hard to the Chinese Communist Party as he does to American political conservative forces. The film then goes on to analyse the agenda of Fox News and its methods of news distortion, how it defames people its presenters and commentators loathe, and how it smooches up to the Republican Party. Numerous examples, often wearying and quickly turning banal in their repetition, of such tricks – confusing reporting with biased comment and opinion; the use of inflammatory language and loaded phrases like “some people say …” and aggressive gestures and body language; giving more air-time to conservative / neo-conservative guests than to others – are illustrated to the point of dulling minds with typical Fox News tedium. Viewers are best advised to fast-forward through some parts (but not too many) of the documentary if they are watching it on DVD.
Most disturbing are revelations of Fox News lying about living conditions in Iraq since the US invasion of 2003 and how such blatant myth-mongering helps to support the conflict there; and of the channel using fear, shock and the threat of terrorism to stampede viewers into supporting its preferred political candidates in Presidential elections or certain positions on issues dealing with the Middle East. Also jaw-dropping are the ways in which Fox News built up George W Bush as a messiah figure and tried to demolish his rival John Kerry in the 2004 Presidential election with insinuations about his patriotism and leadership abilities.
Using Fox News’s own techniques to ram home its message leaves us in no doubt that “Outfoxed …” wants to rouse people from their torpor over the state of TV news reporting in America and do something. The film concludes with calls to action and how viewers can try to influence TV news journalism to return to a more objective style of reporting. However the film runs the dangerous risk of being as propagandistic and strident as its subject and fails to explain how Fox News pushed aside other news channels to dominate TV airwaves or forced them to adopt similarly emotional and confrontational styles of news reporting.
Importantly the documentary ignores the fact that the Democratic Party has been no less guilty than the Republicans of accommodating the Murdoch empire’s demands and agenda, and of buying voters’ loyalty with underhand methods and pork-barrelling. Also bypassed is the fact that a large audience, suspicious of the civil rights movement of the 1960s and disliking past Democrat Presidents such as Franklin D Roosevelt and John F Kennedy for their policies of Keynesian economic interventionism and social justice (however lukewarm), already existed; the groundwork that laid fertile soil for Murdoch to spread his evil seed that took root and thrived had been established as far back as the late 1800s / early 1900s with the “yellow” journalism of William Randolph Hearst and the public relations techniques of Edward Bernays among others.
Above all, “Outfoxed …” fails to look at the wider system within which even Murdoch’s News Corporation empire is but a servant to more powerful individuals and corporations who advocate a particular political / economic / social ideology centred around a small elite that plunders the world for its wealth and finds it necessary to deny large numbers of others any share in the Earth’s bounty. Regardless of whether this elite is “capitalist” or “socialist”, for want of better terms, it worships power and influence and Murdoch is close to it. The danger for him is that he can be toppled as easily and quickly as the road to reach the pinnacle was as long and convoluted. This should have been part of the film’s message.