Terrell Howell (KnightsofNi11) In Robert Greenwald's documentary Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism we come away with one very important message. The media is controlled by corporations. This is what defines the media, and it's because of this that we have Rupert Murdoch taking over the Fox News Channel and turning it into the Conservative machine that spews out right wing bias on a daily basis. Outfoxed takes an in depth look at Fox News and brings to light what makes it tick and the tricks it pulls behind closed doors to become the most bias news station on television.Now, back in 2004 when this came out I could see how Outfoxed would be horribly shocking. It does a great job at pulling back the curtain on Fox News and it reveals some really disturbing things about them. From the way they focus on stories that look good for Conservatives while avoiding others that won't push their agenda, to the tricks they employ to make them seem "fair and balanced" the ridiculous slogan of the network. However, it is 2012 now. Eight years have gone by and Fox News is still like it was when this film came out, but more of us know that now. Fox News is just one big joke today, a news organization that can't be taken seriously, or at least shouldn't be taken seriously. For this reason, watching Outfoxed was just taking in a lot of information I already knew or could have already gathered from my knowledge of what a moronic news organization Fox News is.That being said, Outfoxed is very important, albeit a little redundant. It doesn't hold back on the punches it pulls at Fox, never backing down on its relentless fight to detail Fox's conservative bias. It's got a lot of great information, presents a lot of well spoken individuals to talk about the issues here, and, despite it looking like something that was edited on Windows Movie Maker, it's a pretty well made film. Mainstream media is just such a joke these days that the inspiration to remove bias from the media that the film tries to instill in its viewers is fairly futile. It's unfortunate that that is the case, but the chance of having an unbias media today just seems too fargone to do anything about it. Outfoxed does all that it can, but it may all be for nought.

jzappa Three interconnected essentials of human function are the appetitive, spirited, and rational elements. When each of them demonstrate their characteristics, then one is well controlled, and one benefits from synchronization. Just as a well-ordered state is a just state, someone who enjoys harmony among his three basic elements is a perfectly just, morally good, person. Disharmonious persons cannot be truly happy.Anything but harmony amongst these rudiments therefore leads to one not truly being happy. For anyone who seems fair and balanced on the outside but actually is unfair and biased on the inside, the appetitive and spirited elements have become overbearing. One has lost rational control of their actions. Injustice is a party among these elements, their interfering with and disturbing each other's functions.For Murdoch and the FOX News people, the appetitive element wins out, leading to the accumulation of greater wealth, pleasure, and power. But when the appetitive exceeds its limit, no longer managed rationally, these people may have overabundant amounts of money, luxury, clout, and privilege, yet with the pressures of the immoral things they do for them. Their appetitive have conquered their rational, evidenced by their lifestyles that suffer internal imbalance. They are not happy, albeit they enjoy relative freedom from legal prosecution.Some of them have spirited rudiments fulfilling their appetitive rather than rational. They're most obstinate in on-air confrontations and actually love those moments. The spirited element is a cause for stubbornness and spite, increasing their own inconsistency. One only lies to oneself to deny that Bill O'Reilly fills his head with false information. O'Reilly bears a strained spirited element.Because Fox is dishonest and biased among other things, none of them can be as happy as an actual journalist. You know, people who actually report the news. However, none of the FOX News people seem unhappy. This is because each one inside has a differing sense of happiness and a narrow conception of infighting. FOX News is astonishingly calculatedly insincere. Notice their phrasing pattern: "Some people say" rather than "officials say," what real journalists are trained to say. FOX "Liberals" are centrists, weaker speakers and less attractive than the Conservatives, who are always cleancut, outspoken. They buckle defensively, appearing to generally agree with the intractable Conservatives.Murdoch inherited a newspaper before his first magazine, first TV station, first record label, second TV station, first politician, airline, publishing house, cable channel and ultimately in the'80s, MetroMedia. Murdoch, who adored Reagan and the Republican Congress, ordered MetroMedia to up and adjourn their newscast and air a party-lined homage to Reagan airing at the RNC. Murdoch subsequently complained about coverage of race issues, AIDS, and the Kennedys. MetroMedia argues that it has 0 news value. Murdoch overpowers, not even allowing them to cut it down. Roger Ailes, campaign strategist for Nixon, Reagan, and Bush Sr., is appointed CEO & Chairman, announcing they "aspire to be premier journalists and restore objectivity where they find it lacking."FOX is in constant attack mode during Clinton's final term. The first person to call to say George W. Bush has been elected President of the United States is James Ellis, the man in charge of the FOX News election analysis division, where people crunch the polls. He is also Bush's first cousin. Around 2am, new data comes in from all over Florida showing that the numbers are too close to call a clear winner. Ellis calls it a clear win for George W. Bush. FOX then interrupts its ongoing election coverage to announce this. Within minutes, ABC, NBC, and CBS follow, not having time to clear that data. Weeks later when suspicions are at a boiling point, Ailes issues an apology.Richard Clarke states at a 9/11 Commission hearing that the government, including himself, has failed, asking understanding and forgiveness. FOX muds his name, calling him a Liberal flip-flopper just out to sell his book. All of Murdoch's 175 newspapers editorialize in favor of the Iraq War.Malicious, insensitive and all in all unforgivable monster O'Reilly has on his show Jeremy Glick, a young man whose father died on 9/11 who organized an anti-war petition. Glick prepares by taping each show and timing the amount of time it takes before O'Reilly cuts off his guests, infuriating O'Reilly with his competence and finally cuts his mike and cuts to commercial, threatens him, and execs encourage Glick to leave the building promptly because if O'Reilly sees him in the hallway, "he may end up in jail for assault." The next day, O'Reilly makes Glick out as a monster who claimed Bush planned 9/11. Months later, O'Reilly revisits this, claiming that that's not only "looney" but "defamation."What makes Outfoxed a competent documentary is its refusal to go on its word. Stock footage after stock footage pinpoints the blatant slant, the almost laughable level of preposterous untruthfulness and delusional superiority. It is difficult to build a solid argument against this documentary.

Robert J. Maxwell Well, this is outright propaganda aimed at Fox News. It doesn't pretend to be anything else, and therein lies its superiority to Fox News as reportage and as a source of opinion.I've rarely watched Fox News and so can't comment in much detail on the target of this documentary. But from what I've seen, both on the Fox News Channel and in this film, I find it hard to argue against the proposition that Fox is corrupting our view of the universe.The received wisdom has always been that the media shape our opinions but that's never satisfied me because I can't see it as the entire explanation. Rather, I've always thought of the way we construct reality as a joint function of our news sources and the prejudices that draw us to one source rather than another. What passes for reality is in the interaction between ourselves and the information source. I think this is known as intentionality in philosophy, but it doesn't matter.I'm willing to make a major exception in the case of Fox News. As a "fair and balanced" source of information, it not only sucks in itself but it practically rots the mind of its viewers. Authoritarians and neoconservatives may be drawn to Fox like a moth to a flame, but, like the moth, they will find themselves and their brains fried to a crisp by continued viewing."Outfoxed" gives us a shallow history of how Fox News changed, rather abruptly, from a standard news channel to the number one promoter of the Republican Party that it is today. Mostly we see and hear talking heads, most of them former employees of Fox -- news producers, commentators, reporters -- some of them anonymous.Fox, and the administration whose semi-official spokesman it is, would have a ready reply. Disgruntled former employees, trying to sell books or gain their fifteen minutes of fame or taking revenge on an organization that had good reason to let them go.But the evidence presented in the film is so clear that it's hard to deny. One disgruntled employee, maybe, but a whole slew of them constitutes a pattern. And there are direct quotes from talking points (or "edicts" as one critic calls them) that come down daily from on high, instructing news writers in which events to harp on -- and how to harp on them.And yet, for all that, one has to admire Fox News in certain ways. It was really sui generis. An almost perfect blend of eye-catching graphics, pungent opinion pieces, news presentations that seamlessly blend propaganda with reportage, and a general dumbing down of issues so that the least inquisitive mind can grasp them in all their simplicity. There has never BEEN anything like Fox News, at least not in this country. There have been equivalents in the USSR and other countries, but not here.Greenwald isn't Michael Moore. He's not as reckless and not as entertaining. The film is about the subject, not about its maker. And it's deadly serious, without stunts or jokes, except insofar as the snippets of commentary from Fox news readers are jokes in themselves.There is almost a kind of Gresham's law at work in the news industry, in which dumb news drives out more demanding analysis and understanding. If we hear several times a day that Kerry "flip flops", we know all we need to know about the candidate. He's a flip flopper. We don't need to know the context. We don't even have to know what he's flip flopped on or why. It's enough that we know he's indecisive and deceitful. Who wouldn't buy into a message like that? It goes down like a draught of Pepto-Bismol.The film ends on a kind of up-beat note. We can put an end to this desecration of a respected profession by becoming activists. But can we? Do we really want to? An Ipsos Poll two years ago showed that the vast majority of Fox Viewers, more than 70 percent, still believed that Saddam had close ties with al Qa'eda. (Compared to about 5 percent of PBS/NPR viewers.) A majority also thought that Saddam had WMDs at the time of the invasion. The opportunity to live in such a world of Biblical good and evil, where our every action is the right one, is seductive. I don't know if we can break Murdoch's increasing monopoly of the news media -- short of electing another trust buster like Teddy Roosevelt. (He was a Republican too.)

Ed Uyeshima It is an oversimplification to blame the Bush administration entirely for the sadly effective dismantling of our democratic processes. First, the editors of the nonpartisan Web site, www.spinsanity.org, came out with a revealing book effectively dissecting the empire of media manipulation with "All the President's Spin: George W. Bush, the Media, and the Truth". Now filmmaker Robert Greenwald pinpoints one the most egregious perpetrators, examining the Fox Network's purported hypocrisy in the wholesale undermining of journalism for political purposes. With quite a team of fact finders and investigative reporters supporting him, Greenwald's documentary provides the viewer with a valuable primer on propaganda techniques, proving once again how the subversive goal of creating fear and uncertainty in the minds of viewers is achieved by use of language and repetition. It's very much the same point raised by George Lakoff in his amazing book, "Don't Think of an Elephant: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate--The Essential Guide for Progressives". Here, Greenwald reserves his focus on one powerful man, Rupert Murdoch, and the media empire he has created. Through all the media outlets of his company, News Corp, he can reach a throat-catching 280 million people in the United States! While "Outfoxed" does present a fairly strong case against Murdoch and the Fox News Channel, so much information is presented with great haste, not allowing much time for a viewer to absorb Greenwald's findings. That's why DVD is the ideal format as some can simply pause when they start getting overwhelmed by the onslaught of facts, figures and testimonials by former Fox employees and even renowned newscasters such as Walter Cronkite. In fact, Cronkite says in the film that Murdoch never had any intention except to build a right-wing network, but that seems highly suspect given the aggressively posturing media stars that have risen since its debut. Unsurprisingly, Fox News' top host Sean Hannity comes across as an unmitigated bully, but Bill O'Reilly, arguably the network's biggest star, reveals himself in the film as someone with obvious issues around anger management and journalistic integrity. In what has to be the most revealing moment in the film, a son of a worker killed in the World Trade Center on 9/11 appears as a guest on O'Reilly's show, and he takes the host on and refuses to be intimidated by his insistent berating. When O'Reilly senses his leverage diminishing, he loses his temper, makes nasty accusations and then unprofessionally pulls the plug on his microphone. Fast and furious, this is no-hold-barred film-making. And unlike many other documentaries produced in a rush before the election, this one actually has legs afterward. Highly recommended viewing.