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In the foxhole September 25, 2004 A documentary blasts the Murdoch network's Republican bias, but cyber-savvy citizens are taking all media to task, writes Paul Sheehan. In the never-ending culture war being waged in the American media, the biggest target this week was CBS News, once the dominant network news organisation in the United States. CBS has been blamed and shamed for launching an attack on George Bush's military record based on forged documents. For the past week, the mistake has been covered in obsessive detail by the Fox News Channel, whose aggressive partisanship has made its owner, Rupert Murdoch, one of the most loathed figures in America. Just how much Murdoch is loathed by those on the left side of the political spectrum can be seen in a new documentary, Outfoxed, to be released in Australian theatres on October 7. It is not a blockbuster like Fahrenheit 9/11, Michael Moore's ferocious anti-Bush documentary, which has grossed $US118 million ($165 million) so far in the US, but it burns with as much contempt for its target. Robert Greenwald, the film's director-producer, says it was "physically painful" to do the research: "I don't know how to describe the pain of watching hours and hours of Fox News . . . the combination of abrasive attack mode all the time, the fear-mongering, the gross amounts of overstatement and bias." Outfoxed is not just criticism, it is brutal criticism. It is not just concerned, it is alarmed. It begins with a clip from The Godfather II, a scene where one of the lead mobsters is holding a party to celebrate the Mafia's control of Cuba. Not long after this scene the film switches to the author David Brock, who says: "This is the environment we live in and it is fundamentally undermining democracy." Brock is only one among dozens of media analysts and former Fox staffers who take an alarmist view of Fox News. Larry Johnson: "It is very much an environment of fear ..." Jeff Cohen: "To say it is fair and balanced is consumer fraud." Eric Alterman: "Their coverage completely coincides with the Bush Administration's policies." Peter Hart: "Murdoch is absolutely, to his core, a partisan." The comedian and author, Al Franken, says the top anchor on Fox News, Bill O'Reilly "lies so pathologically". Outfoxed gives example after example of how Fox News receives its orders from the top, through daily executive memos which outline the main message of the day, and then anchor after anchor repeats the mantra, invariably one that benefits the Republicans and lampoons the Democrats. A simple message, such as Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry "flip-flopping" on the issues, is repeated relentlessly in show after show. Fox justifies this partisanship as an insurrection against an arrogant, liberal, Democratic media group led by The New York Times and The Washington Post and the three major networks, ABC, NBC and CBS, which for half a century dominated the media landscape of the US. And Fox is only part of a much bigger picture. So radically has the media landscape changed with the advent of the internet and cable television that it is instructive how quickly CBS News was exposed after it broadcast its tainted report on 60 Minutes (the original show, not the Australian copy). An internet blogger, or one-person media critic, operating under the name "Buckhead", broke the story within hours of the "expose" appearing on CBS. Buckhead pointed out that the network's story was based on documents created on Microsoft Word, which was not invented when the supposedly typewritten military records were created. The next day, another online media watcher, Charles Johnson on the Little Green Footballs website, overlayed Microsoft Word documents with an exact match of the supposed typewriter keystrokes on the forged documents. It was yet another victory for the internet over the mass media. Fox News feasted on these revelations. It is to the news business what the World Wrestling Federation is to professional sport: completely contrived, enormously popular, and highly profitable. The anti-corporate message of Outfoxed has had powerful company this year, with Fahrenheit 9/11 breaking all records and all expectations for a documentary; Morgan Spurlock's Super Size Me single-handedly changing the culture of McDonald's (though strenuously denied by the company); the master documentary-maker, Errol Morris, producing the anti-war epic, The Fog of War; and The Corporation, forming a sort of anti-corporate bookend to Outfoxed. Outfoxed is also a backlash against a backlash. Fox News and Rupert Murdoch are merely elements in a much larger insurrection against the dominant media over the past decade driven by new technologies, notably the internet and cable TV, and generating a stream of best-selling books, including Bias by Bernard Goldberg, formerly of CBS News. He argues that the dominant media was simply unable or unwilling to see its own bias: "It is the inability to see liberal views as liberal that is at the heart of the problem ... And that is why the media stars can so easily talk about 'right-wing' Republicans and 'right-wing' Christians ... and 'right-wing' radio talk-show hosts but the only time they utter the words 'left-wing' is when they're talking about an airplane. "Conservatives must be identified because the audience needs to know these are people with axes to grind. But liberals don't need to be identified because their views on all the big social issues ... aren't liberal views at all. They're simply reasonable views, shared by all reasonable people ..." This irony is missed in Outfoxed. So intent is Greenwald on attacking the Republican Red Menace of Murdoch that he uses many of the tactics he accuses Fox of deploying: stacking the deck with pre-approved pundits, distorting facts, omitting crucial information. Anyone watching this documentary would assume that Fox News has a huge reach inside the American market. The film says at the outset, Murdoch's TV networks "reach 280 million people". But that's only the potential market. Nowhere in Outfoxed does it say that, on average, about 1 million people watch Fox News each day. Major news events produce major spikes. Fox boomed during the Iraq invasion, for which it was the chief cheerleader, reaching almost 6 million daily viewers. One million viewers is a big number, and bigger than the share won by rival CNN, and a spike of 6 million viewers is a very big number, but Fox gets only a fraction of the daily American news market. The CBS Evening News, the least-watched broadcast network evening news program, still gets about 9 million viewers on an average night. Fox News calls itself "fair and balanced", and offers "real journalism that America trusts". This may be a brazen parody of the truth but is a brilliant propaganda message, repeated endlessly. When The New York Times accused O'Reilly, star anchor - and the most objectionable - of being a mouthpiece for Murdoch, he blasted away from his Foxhole: "News Corp's CEO, Rupert Murdoch, has not once said anything to me about my coverage in 6 years. Not once. Our coverage has been fair and our ratings have been enormous. That's why they are furious. They are losing their power." Murdoch doesn't have to say a thing. Outfoxed shows that the daily management memos, and the corporate culture, make it manifestly clear what messages the network will fixate on each day. The coverage is fair, if you want a conservative slant, and unfair if you don't. O'Reilly is right about the mainstream media being furious. It is losing its power. The power and the structure of the mass media is shifting. The most used, and most respected, news and information source in the world is Google, which didn't exist a decade ago (it was created in 1996). It doesn't even have any reporters, or news product, or opinion to sell. It is a search engine. A tool. It is such a brilliant tool that it has democratised and broadened the flow of information, has helped the public sift through the mountains of garbage in cyberspace, and serves as an extremely effective clearing house of breaking news. It is also a form of participatory democracy. Google and all the other elements in the digital revolution will constantly prove subversive to the status quo, just as Outfoxed would like to be. But not many people will see the film, especially compared with the number who watch Murdoch's networks or read his newspapers. It is strictly an arthouse product, and had a very modest box office in the US, much less than $US1 million. It is designed for the booming DVD market and in this format has been a success. More than 100,000 DVDs of Outfoxed have been sold in two months, yet another way in which changing technology is changing the way ideas are transmitted. GO CUBS!!!!!!!!!
King Daevid MacKenzie, La Crosse, Wisconsin, USA How Radio is done. No brag, just fact. http://ultimajock.blogspot.com "Fear and God do not inhabit the same space." DICK GREGORY "In an ugly time as this the true protest is beauty." PHIL OCHS Apply for Commercial Real Estate loans online and submit your deal to dozens of hungry lenders in just minutes. Loan programs for all types of business and commercial real estate. Apply anytime at http://realestatezoo.com b i s e x u a l =============== a bifem.net publication Post message: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subscribe: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe: [EMAIL PROTECTED] List owner: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Web Site: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Bisexual
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