Some people say...

& I watched Outfoxed last night… It was pretty amateurish, and was obviously partisan, but I think if you paid less attention to the pundits and more attention to the footage, you will get more out of the film. In all, though, I think the film is preaching to the choir of those who already think that Fox News is biased. The problem with Outfoxed is that by showing tons of snippets of the talking heads on Fox slagging Kerry while championing Bush, or treating Iraq with kid gloves, you are removing the contextual cues. It is impossible to tell the context of these clips, and therefore it is impossible to tell whether Fox is injecting bias in a clip or it is because the clip is taken out of context, unless you are familiar with all of the FNC shows and know which ones are op-ed (O’Reilly) and which ones are supposed to be pure news (Brit Hume during the week, but not on sunday). There isn’t a doubt in my mind that FNC is far right, but this movie just came off as leftie propaganda (whether it is or not).

In addition to just watching the rabble of clips they used from FNC in Outfoxed, and reinforcing my opinion of the network, what really interested me was how they made the film in the Behind the Scenes short. They had gobs of redundant dvd burners recording FNC 24 hours a day for months, organizing the DVDs in those big Case Logic CD/DVD wallets. Then they had a panel of volunteers from around the country that were assigned different blocks of programming and watched it, noting when FNC seemed to stray into the grey or red of integrity. The volunteers reported their observations and then the director and his PAs when back to their DVD archive and mined the footage out of it. Very interesting…

Like I said, the amateurish (hackish, even) nature of this film probably won’t win anybody over, but who knows… Regardless, hopefully it will be a tool used to energize those who already think that FNC is being intentionally deceitful with it’s “Fair & Balanced” mantra and begin to push back…