Sunday 4 December 2011

Outfoxed

The subtitle of this movie is "Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism". It would be more fair (ha!) to say "How Fox Spins the News" would be a more accurate subtitle as this isn't about Murdoch (at least not directly) but more a documentary for how Fox News tactics work to spin the news how they want to, and the impact they have on actual news (what they do is not 'news' by any definition that relates to 'imparting new information').

Biased? Yes, but so is Fox News. At least, it is as portrayed in this movie from 2004, right before the "reelection of George Bush" as they called it. In many ways this was a serious documentary version of many swipes at Fox done by Daily Show.

But, to be fair to Daily Show, they do attack more than just Fox News. In this movie, we don't get to see that other networks are better, nor is there an official take from Fox itself (although one can easily imagine what the response would be... and take a look at the Wikipedia entry to see if you are right).

The last few minutes (practically) of the movie is a call to action against biased media. Certainly a stance to take, and this movie is a good call for that. Just make sure it's more than just the obvious targets that are examined.

Definitely worth a look to see how Fox operates... and then wonder how many other stations looked at this and thought "so that's what we should be doing"...

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