PREMIERE.COM'S REVIEW (posted 8/31/04)


If every direct-to-DVD release drummed up enough buzz to find its way onto a few movie screens, Dolph Lundgren would be a very happy camper. Instead it’s documentary filmmaker Robert Greenwald who has cause to celebrate. Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s War on Journalism, a scathing documentary that paints the Fox News Channel as nothing more than a mouthpiece for the conservative right, has attracted so much attention via Amazon.com and MoveOn.org that it has now made its way into a few theaters.

Like the The Hunting of the President or Fahrenheit 9/11, Outfoxed doesn’t pretend to be non-partisan, but the most damning evidence for its case comes from Fox News itself. The documentary kicks off with a convincing exposé of the direct ties between the Republican Party and the Fox News Channel, from Fox's leadership down the men and women who do the grunt work, most exasperatingly in a bit of raw footage from 2000 in which a reporter chats gingerly with George W. Bush before a “hard-hitting” interview. The pair are talking about the reporter’s wife, who is working for the Bush campaign. Conversely, an ex-employee says she was taken off the Gore beat for being a Democrat and therefore, too biased.  

Hearing one coiffed and tan ex-Los Angeles on-air talent complain that he was reprimanded for failing to make a small story about Reagan’s birthday seem bigger isn’t too compelling, and the doc’s parade of sit-down interviews (many of them amateurishly shot), internal memos, and voice-distorted anonymous tales of a restrictive work environment from ex-employees gets tiresome, but in the case of Outfoxed’s thesis, the proof is in the pudding. In other words, the clips from Fox News itself are the most jaw-dropping, and for any true adherent to journalistic ethics, horrifying.

The movie sets up how Fox News talent will use the difficult-to-qualify phrase “some people say” when inserting a conservative talking point followed by multiple examples. In one instance Bill O’Reilly claims he’s only once told a guest to “shut up,” which is followed by a barrage of clips of him doing exactly that, most disgustingly as he goes to verbal war against the soft-spoken son of a 9/11 victim who dared to publicly question the war in Iraq.

After awhile the movie starts to feel like it should have wrapped up a half-hour earlier because it has already so thoroughly and effectively made its case; but then again, Fox News Channel spends 24 hours a day to driving its themes homes, so what are a couple of hours compared to that?

—Ryan J. Downey