Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism

[PopHistorian]

Watched this yesterday. Alchemy mentioned it in a post, but I don't think it's been discussed. It's pretty good, but I wouldn't show it to a Fox News fan because they make their points sometimes with anecdotes that are a bit too flimsy, and they really didn't need to stretch like that.

It's mainly 78 minutes of ex-Fox employees, other journalists, and media analysts pointing out biases, conflicts of interests, opinion-swaying tricks, and that Fox News is not really a news organization but an organ of the Republican party (and that "Fair & Balanced" as a tagline is really consumer fraud). That's another thing, instead of focusing on the lies and propaganda, the film mentions Republicans far too often, and prominently displays moveon.org's address among the first the credits, making the film appear to be biased to the left. They should've concentrated on the lying and the lack of basic journalistic principles at Fox.

I also wish they'd devoted much more than the few minutes they did near the end to the takeover of the radio waves by the likes of ClearChannel.

Watch to learn the tricks of CoIntelPro they use to make opinion sound like news, opposing viewpoints sound ridiculous, and naive would-be truth-tellers on their talk shows made to lose every argument (no matter how much sense they make).

http://www(dot)outfoxed.org/

 

[Johnno]

I would also recommend this documentary, yes it is flawed in places but overall it is very good. It was so good, NEWS Corp papers in Australia refused to run the original ads for cinemas where it playing because they considered it "offensive", these are papers with ads for brothels in the classified section BTW. Pared down ads with the name of the movie with a time and cinema location were allowed.

That Bill O'Reilly is really a piece of work. There was one interviewee who was describing how it would be hard to sue him for defamation because one would have to prove he KNEW he was lying...... which would have been hard since he apparently lies so regularly.

I also noted how Fox news experts (there's a presentation regarding the experts on hand which is another eye opener in itself) have been dropped on a regular basis for presenting the facts which weren't in line with Fox editorial policy. A policy that included not referring to American army "snipers" and referring to them as "sharp shooters" and another instance where a reporter had to go out the Ronald Reagan library and make it look as if major celebratons of Reagan's birthday were taking place.

It would be funny if it wasn't so serious.