July 19, 2004

I'm going to start with some of my background and opinions about Fox News before I get to discussing Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism. And yes, you can assume that I am trying to make my intentions clear before writing a negative review of a really shoddy, flawed "documentary." One has to do that now… and still, one is likely to be accused of being too "my best friend is black" about it all. The New McCarthyism is in full swing and anything but the "party line" is more than a little dangerous for anyone who speaks out.

So…

Fox News Channel is a right wing, bullying tabloid - an often entertaining circus led on-air by a parade of preening self-aggrandizing truth-twisting monkeys unlike any I have ever seen located in one place. Only a moron would go to Fox News Channel and believe that the news there is fair and balanced… though I suspect that the notion of balance is a lot more complex than most of us choose to consider. That is not to say that everyone who likes Fox News Channel is a moron. Many viewers are there, as I am when I watch, to clue themselves into the most extreme political position being floated out there. Others are conservatives who embrace the same principles of most of the shows and talent on the cable net. It certainly will get you a bad table at Spago, but being a conservative is not analogous to being a child rapist, no matter what this town would tell you these days.

My personal experience with Bill O'Reilly was no different than my experience with him on-air. I was brought on to talk about 8 Mile, as one of the few critics who felt that there were serious political problems with the film. I was the negative side. But the way things played out, O'Reilly's positions were so off the deep end that I spent most of my time on air defending the film, filmmakers and studio from his xenophobic paranoia. He was actually polite to me. But he was still a bombastic, obnoxious, loud, relentless bully with a big pulpit, a quick enough mind to make the machine work and a tendency to arrogance so extreme that if he were to think you were something special you would spend a lot of time looking into the mirror trying to figure out what was wrong with you.

I actually worked for Fox at the very beginning of the network at their New York flagship station where A Current Affair was produced. Rupert Murdoch was in the house most of the time and was very hands on with ACA, at that time his favorite show. Personally, I found it shocking that Murdoch was spending so much time and focus on tabloid junk like A Current Affair. But there he was. The show I was working as a producer on, a daytime chat show called Good Day New York, hosted by a still hairy Matt Lauer and a still brain-light Jill Rappaport ended up being cancelled on a whim… someone wanted to use the stage our show was being shot on each afternoon. It was my first professional television producing job and losing it on a whim did not make me happy.

So now…

There is a grand total on one actual disturbing discovery made in Robert Greenwald's new documentary Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism. One. Fox News Channel's lead election correspondent, Carl Cameron, has a wife who was volunteering for the Bush campaign. That conflict of interest is obvious - though not as obvious as if she was on the Bush payroll - and no legitimate news organization should allow that kind of one-step-away bias to exist with a lead correspondent. You can't fire a guy for who his wife chooses to campaign. But this just felt ridiculous.

Unfortunately, while we all know that Fox News Channel is Unfair and Unbalanced in many ways, Outfoxed's title is way too ironic because it is, itself, not only unbalanced and unfair, but it misses its targets by such a distance that it detracts from a debate that really needs to be had.

The media conglomerization of the world is a nightmare. It really is less than a dozen companies that control the vast majority of media in the world now. And no good can come of that. Unfortunately for the left, while the Reagan Administration flirted with opening the FCC rules too wide, it was primarily under Clinton's administration that the doors opened as wide as they are now. So the real subject of this documentary… one desperately needed and one that should surely include Fox News… was thrown away for a better piece of self-promotion.

One of the last interviewees shown, a producer named Len Hill, says that we must "not let 5 companies control the airwaves." Dead on. Another talking head talks about the deterioration of "media policies for the past 50 years, increasingly for the last 20 years." But the film is not about the 5 companies or the last 20 years of deteriorating standards. It is about Rupert Murdoch… not, apparently, because he is the worst offender, but because his network is the furthest to the right politically.

Whatever your politics, the most shocking thing about this film is the overall absence of Rupert Murdoch. He is set up at the start as the target, but his direct influence on Fox News… in spite of many tape recorded anonymous sources and lots of on-camera interviews with former employees… is never established. It was assumed going into the film and the inference of the network matching his personal interests is repeated, but not only is there no proof, there is not even a clear inference of what Murdoch wants.

The centerpiece of the film is a series of daily memos from a senior producer of the Fox News Channel, setting a tone for the day's coverage. Walter Cronkite gets sucked into it, stating that he's "never heard of any other network or any other legitimate news organization doing that, newspaper or broadcast." But anyone who has ever worked in media and has been to a staff meeting in which stories are discussed and pitched has had this conversation without the technology of e-mail.

But what is most shocking about these memos is how benign they are. Do you think these thoughts are really out of line?

-- Republican nominees being held up exclusively over the abortion issue

-- In reference to the 9/11 hearings and Bush - "Do not turn this into Watergate." Have the results been Watergate-esque so far?

-- Instructions to cover a Kerry stump speech that they expect will touch on Iraq. Instructions indicate to take the start of the speech live, see if there is something new, and that if there is not, they should not feel obligated to run the whole speech live.

-- Instructions to call Marines "sharpshooters, not snipers" in an effort to be positive.

And perhaps the most damning thing about the memos is how Greenwald frames one about Abu Ghraib that points out that there is footage of a blindfolded American soldier being abused in some less severe way that wasn't getting attention, asking, "Who is outraged on a U.S. POW's behalf?" But when this section of this memo is read, the voice over leaves out one sentence. About the Abu Ghraib photos, the Fox producer wrote, "They have rightly provoked outrage." Why was that left out? Can you come up with a reason that would have anything to do with fairness?

Then there is the Bill O'Reilly attack on the time he told Jeffrey Glick to "shut up" on the air. In a classic bit to make an asshole look like a lying asshole, Greenwald shows O'Reilly saying that he had only told someone to "shut up" once in the then six year history of the show. He then throws together half a dozen times when O'Reilly says the words "shut up." But four of them were in context of sentences he was reading, not a command, and the fifth was on C-SPAN at a book fair, as I recall. The only example from the show, telling a guest to "shut up" was the Glick interview. Of course, Greenwald counts on no one paying that much attention and just giggling at O'Reilly The Liar. Even a fool deserves better from an alleged documentarian.

There are literally dozens of those kinds of near-truths. One former paid talking head for the net claims he was "not used" for the last eight weeks of his contract after going toe-to-toe with Sean Hannity on air. But this was after more than a year on air and he boasts earlier in the doc that he regularly flaunted network instructions to spin stories. So why did this discussion with Hannity become his last on Fox News? I don't know. I'd like to know more.

Another former employee, a reporter, goes on about how they did an unnecessary tribute to Ronald Reagan and, at the end, almost in passing, says, "I was suspended for that!" Really? Did AFTRA know? He was suspended for not making a boring event at the Ronald Reagan library exciting enough? Really?

There is this rather breathtaking revelation. "Hannity is a good looking, all-American, clean cut kind of guy and his counterpart is a little squirrelly looking. And it sends a subtle message." So Alan Colmes, now employed as a team with Hannity for eight years, is too unattractive to speak for the left? Is that what the left is about? Are we saying that James Carville can't keep up with boy-tie Tucker Carlson now because of the bald pate?

The example of an obsession with religion centers around an interview with Tom Junod on "Why Is Jesus Hot Right Now?" The problem with blaming Fox News for that is that Junod wrote that story for Esquire, not Fox News. Was Fox News supposed to be the only news organization in the world not to cover The Passion of the Christ to excess?

That theme is all over Outfoxed. Things that are wrong with the media now - and there is a lot to look at - are all Fox News' fault, down to a bizarre bit about Fox News' evil influence on all media. Of course, the Fox News call at 2am on election night that Bush had won Florida had "more to do with making George Bush the president than any recall or ballot design flaws." Never mind that other networks had made that call earlier in the evening and stepped back off it afterwards.

Christiane Amanpour of CNN claims that the network was "intimidated by the administration and its foot soldiers at Fox News and it (bring about) a climate of fear and self-censorship." CNN was intimidated by Fox News? You know what I call the CNN employee who lets Fox News coverage guide his or her coverage decisions? I call them "fired."

Anyway… there are a lot of examples. There is the whole section of the film dedicated to the notions of television so well expressed in Bowling for Columbine… as a national media-driven weakness, not as Rupert Murdoch's personal folly. There was the discussion on a PIPA poll comparing Fox News watchers versus NPR/PBS viewers, never acknowledging that NPR and PBS also have an ideological bent. (The scariest thing in the whole doc is that 11 percent of NPR/PBS viewers/listeners thought there were WMDs in Iraq…. How you can listen to either outlet and not know that… egads!)

But enough of details and facts. After all, they don't interest Robert Greenwald very much here. There is a statement made by one of the talking heads in this film…

"If they can muddy the argument enough, if they can turn it into a draw, then that to them is a victory because it denies the other side a victory."

"They." "The other side." One side denying the other. That kind bias is the premise of this doc. But it is not the Fox News' bias. It is Robert Greenwald's.

There is a great story to be told. Of course, Fox News is biased. But what attracts so many people to it? Why are so few people in charge of so much of our news? Why can't a guy like Phil Donahue succeed in this atmosphere? What's really gone wrong and who is really responsible?

Instead, it's a conspiracy… Murdoch… the right… too easy… and exactly what Greenwald accuses Fox News of handling their coverage. Hmmmm…

READER OF THE DAY: THE RA writes: "I took a risk with I, Robot and unfortunately it was what I feared - dumb characters saying dumb things in the service of a dumb plot. I keep waiting for Will Smith to surprise me. He's an extremely likeable guy but he ain't an actor, he's a performer. Every scene made me cringe as he mugged for the camera and offered those interminable witty retorts with that knowing gleam in his eye. There are so many in I, Robot that it's like swallowing an entire banana cream pie -- no matter how much you like banana cream pie, volume don't make it better. Sorry, Will, but you're that popular guy in high school who gets the lead in the play because you're cool, not because you know how to act."

But CP NOT K writes: "I saw I, Robot today and I was very surprised at how much I liked it. And although I enjoyed the action sequences, I felt like this was a film with more on its mind than explosions. Reading most of the reviews for the film, afterward, though, I was shocked at how many -- even the positive ones -- went out of their way to call the movie "dumb" or "brainless."

Then again, I guess I shouldn't be surprised, as a great number of critics slammed "Dark City" in the same way -- visually awesome, but dumb. I thought "Dark City" was one of the deepest, smartest sci-fi films of the 90s. "I, Robot" had some problems, but I found it overall very similar to "Dark City" and I'm wondering if maybe I am missing why these movies are "dumb."

Both films deal with the individual fighting against the enslavement of groupthink. They're both treatices on the power of the individual. In "Dark City," it's John Murdoch (Rufus Sewell) who learns to be an individual in the face of the awesome power of the
Strangers. In "I, Robot," (a character) finds his freedom from the group.

What I don't understand, Dave, is why all the critics I've read seem to completely ignore the ending of "I, Robot." Sure, the penultimate action sequence is spectacular and kinetic, but I felt like the whole point of the movie lies in its quiet, thoughtful aftermath. The end of the film belongs to (EDITED FOR SPOILERS) -- that's an inspiring, creepy, ambiguous image that says a lot more than the explosions that preceded it.

Are critics unable to hold two thoughts in their head? If a film is loud, kinetic, action packed and, yes, a little cliche, do they close their minds to anything ELSE the filmmaker might be getting at? Does a lot of action and CGI automatically make a movie "dumb"?

I think you hit it on the head in your review, when you say Proyas allows the audiences to make the connections for themselves. I obviously thought "Dark City" was more successful than you did, but in both that and "I, Robot," Proyas lets the audience do a lot of the intellectual and philosophical work on their own. Do you think most critics are calling "I, Robot" dumb because they aren't willing to look beyond the explosions? Or am I giving the movie too much credit?"

E ME: Well?