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Next Brave New Film -- THE BIG BUY: How Tom DeLay Stole Congress.
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"It's unfair, it's slanted and it's a hit job. And I haven't even seen it yet."
"rank propaganda ... the distorted work of an ultra-liberal filmmaker"
"a third-rate hack job"
"a cheesy little so-called documentary about FOX News Channel, given the cutesy title 'Outfoxed.'"
"Bring it on!"
"To say that this network promotes the Republican view, not the conservative view, but the Republican view is like saying that the pope is Catholic. It's self-evident."
"They're on somewhat solid ground when they talk about -- if you look at some of the talk shows, the conservative hosts are much better at demonizing the Democrats than the liberal hosts of those shows."
Check out the blogs of Clara Frenk (FOX whistleblower), Larry Lessig (legal advisor), Jim Gilliam (co-producer), and The Newshounds (FOX researchers).
The Advertiser, Stan James (October 16, 2004)
An examination of a cable news network and its influence on the American political scene.
Just as Michael Moore took aim at US President George W. Bush in Fahrenheit 9/11, Robert Greenwald has made media owner Rupert Murdoch his target.
In particular, producer-director Greenwald's aural and visual assault is on the Fox News cable TV channel, its alleged right-wing bias in its political coverage, confronting interviews and a criterion of generating fear with a "we're right, you're wrong no matter what" line.
Greenwald interweaves interviews with former Fox producers, reporters and contributors with internal memos, media analysts and writers to construct a case of the network being a Republican lobby group.
He uses an amusing and telling style of repetitive, rapid-fire montages to show how phrases, such as flip-flop, are repeated to muddy political arguments.
He opens with a slick biography of Mr Murdoch's 50-year rise of media power, from an Adelaide newspaper to a worldwide media network which reaches 4.7 billion people.
Discussions with former Fox News employees on several levels claim they were ordered to carry propaganda, discredit and skew news against Democrats, meld news and commentary and negatively caricature Mr Bush's presidential opponent, John Kerry, all under the network's slogans of "Fair and Balanced", and "We Report, You Decide".
Many of the former employees are unseen and use voice distortion for anonymity which tends to weaken Greenwald's case.
There also isn't representative comment from the Fox network or news executives from other networks.
The biggest gun is reserved for Fox's extreme right commentator, Bill O'Reilly, and his show The O'Reilly Factor.
Greenwald's charge at Fox has the appearance of a quick assembly and uses a similar method of bias as the network, inherent in the clips he uses.
That aside, the documentary's most worrying claim is that of the Fox effect - that other networks are imitating with cheap, easy stories for gut reactions, and opinion commentators are replacing journalists.