Outfoxed

[Adam]

Not sure if this belongs in this forum or not but, in an effort to kickstart a discussion here, here goes...

Has anyone seen Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism (http://www.outfoxed.org/)? I just purchased it, based on a review I read at Salon (http://www.salon.com), but I haven't watched it yet.

[livius drusus]

I haven't seen it yet, but I bought the DVD yesterday after reading that same review. I figured I better snag a copy fast in case they get dragged to court over the, um, liberal interpretation of fair use.

[Adam]

Well, it's here...I'm probably going to watch it over the weekend, so we'll see.

[livius drusus]

So didya watch it?

[pzmyers]

My review (http://pharyngula.org/index/weblog/comments/outfoxed/).

I liked it, I thought it made a persuasive case, but really, the answer is...turn off your TV.

[livius drusus]

Interesting review, pz. I liked your concluding paragraph a great deal:

It seems to me that Rupert Murdoch and ClearChannel are little more than scavengers who are successfully ripping into the carcasses of old media...media with wide influence, but media that are also limited and shallow. Shouldn't one of our strategies be to encourage more abandonment of TV and radio news? It's suitable for entertainment, nothing more.

[Adam]

So, I finally watched the damned thing tonight, thanks to my rommate asking me, "Hey, are you ever going to watch that RUpert Murdoch movie?" It wasn't as interesting as I hoped it would be. While I think it probably does a pretty good job introducing the uninitiated to the not so subtle ways that Faux News manages to be a right wing shill while pretending to be "Fair and Balanced", there really isn't a whole lot of new information for someone who's been paying attention to Murdoch's private version of Pravda over the years. If nothing else, though, it's a handy reference collection of some of Fox's worst offenses. I'd deinfitely recommend it to someone who had heard that Fox News is a bit skewed but doesn't know the details.

I did think that a better job could have been done in editing and footage selction. One particularly glaring example is a bit where a clip is shown where Bill O'Reilly claims only to have told a guest to "shut up" once, and then followed by a montage of O'Reilly saying "Shut up" over and over. The problem is, only the first two clips feature O'Reilly actually telling a guest to "Shut up" The remainder are O'Reilly firing off general "Shut up"'s to anyone watching who happens to disagree with him (i.e, "Anyone who disagrees with the president in wartime can shut up.").

[Adam]

I agree, nice review, pz.

Oh, one thing I forgot to mention...Outfoxed moment that brought me the closest to throwing things at the television: an analyst is talking to O'Reilly about how John Kerry "looks French", and points to his ski vacation (th eone where he apparently snapped at a secret service agent) as an example of how vacationing doesn't really fit the "American archetype", whatever that means. Hey, what was the name of that guy who set the record for the most time spent on vacation during the first nine months of his presidency? Starts with "George", ends with "Bush", and there's a "W" in the middle?

[Paul H.]

>>While I think it probably does a pretty good job introducing the uninitiated to the not so subtle ways that Faux News manages to be a right wing shill while pretending to be "Fair and Balanced", there really isn't a whole lot of new information for someone who's been paying attention to Murdoch's private version of Pravda over the years.<<

Nicely put.

But for many, many people this will be their first 'in depth' (as in, more than one sentence) look at this. At least it's on the video store shelf. At all.

I rate it as; "better than a poke in the eye with a blunt stick".


Thought (Memo) For The Day: "I'm sure there was room to say 'Owellian' a lot more in this doco".

[Ensign Steve]

Wow, what's with the thread necromancy?

I miss pz. :sigh:

[username]

Has anyone seen Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism (http://www.outfoxed.org/)? I just purchased it, based on a review I read at Salon (http://www.salon.com), but I haven't watched it yet.

I rented it a year or so ago. I thought it was sloppily done in some parts and reflected an obvious bias that it reached a bit too far in an attempt to prove.

That said, I also felt it did enough right to reveal that the goings on at Fox News are less than 'fair and balanced'.

Thing is, Fox News is a favorite target of many because of it's obvious slant while it claims being fair and balanced, but I think it was Chomsky who took a more general look at popular media and exposed the inner workings and showed pretty much none of it had much regard for truth and objectivity so it seems to just boil down to which bias one prefers and if one doesn't want bias, then turn off the tube.