New Documentary Aims to Demonstrate Bias on Fox News
by Frazier Moore
NEW YORK -- A new documentary backed by liberal political groups aims to document that the Fox News Channel is anything but ``fair and balanced,'' despite the cable-news network's motto.
The film, ``Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism,'' draws on clips compiled during weeks of round-the-clock taping of the network to demonstrate what the filmmakers believe is a pattern of right-wing bias and support for the Republican agenda.
<font color=red>``What we found is not that Fox is a conservative network, but that it's a network that follows the party line of the Bush administration,'' <font color=black>said ``Outfoxed'' filmmaker Robert Greenwald, a Hollywood producer-director whose credits include the 2003 documentary ``Uncovered: The Whole Truth About the Iraq War'' and such TV films as ``The Crooked E: The Unshredded Truth about Enron'' and ``Blonde,'' a biopic of Marilyn Monroe.
Greenwald said he decided to make the film after hearing numerous journalists refer to the ``Foxification'' of the news. That approach, he says, has served the 8-year-old Fox News Channel well, and ``put pressure on many of the other networks to move in the same direction: cheap news, ranting and raving, pseudo-patriotism.''
Greenwald's 75-minute film includes complaints from several Fox News staffers about the workplace climate at the outlet of the global Murdoch media empire. They say their bosses promote a conservative slant.
``We weren't necessarily, as it was told to us, a newsgathering organization so much as we were a proponent of a point of view,'' says Jon Du Pre, a former Fox News correspondent.
The film also quotes internal memos from a top network executive that seem to call for pro-Bush coverage.
``Ribbons or medals? Which did John Kerry throw away after he returned from Vietnam?'' wrote senior vice president for news John Moody in an April memo to the staff. ``His perceived disrespect for the military could be more damaging to the (Democratic presidential) candidate than questions about his actions in uniform.''
In a statement Monday, the network dismissed the whistleblowers as ``former low-level Fox employees'' who are ``hardly worth addressing.'' It challenged other media organizations to make public their own employee memos, whereupon ``Fox News Channel will publish 100 percent of our editorial directions and memos, and let the public decide who is fair.''
The film also draws on a study commissioned by Fairness & Accuracy in Media, a national media watchdog group. The study found conservatives accounted for nearly three-fourths of ideological guests on the network's marquee news program, ``Special Report with Brit Hume,'' between June and December 2003, and that Republicans outnumbered Democrats five to one.
``Outfoxed'' was compiled during the past seven months in association with liberal political organizations Center for American Progress and MoveOn.Org, as well as the citizens' lobbying group Common Cause.
Budgeted at $300,000, the ``guerrilla'' documentary will premiere today at the New School University in Manhattan, then initially be distributed through private ``house party'' screenings and DVD sales.
At a news conference to introduce the film Monday, Greenwald called Fox News Channel ``an opinion station, not a news station.''
When former White House terrorism coordinator Richard Clarke testified before the 9-11 commission, he apologized to the American people for the government's failure to protect them.
The film displays a flurry of Fox pundits blasting Clarke, often in similar terms. ``It was almost like Fox News was working off of the playbook coming out of the White House, that he had to be torn down,'' FAIR co-founder Jeff Cohen says in the film.
Fox host Bill O'Reilly is seen on his show insisting he has told a guest to shut up ``only once in six years,'' after which he is seen in clips telling one person after another with whom he disagrees to ``shut up.''
The documentary also includes a rapid-fire succession of clips of more than a dozen Fox hosts using the phrase ``some people say'' - which the filmmakers say is a way to insinuate opinion disguised as reporting into on-air discussions.
``There's no smoking gun,'' Greenwald admitted in explaining what his film set out to reveal - ``just a pattern.''
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