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Dom Robinson reviews
Rykodisc
- Cert:
- Cat.no: RVN 6000
- Running time: 78 minutes
- Year: 2004
- Pressing: 2004
- Region(s): 2, PAL
- Chapters: 22 plus extras
- Sound: Dolby Digital 2.0 (Stereo)
- Languages: English
- Subtitles: None
- Fullscreen: 1.33:1
- Macrovision: Yes
- Disc Format: DVD 9
- Price: £12.99
- Extras: Behind-the-scenes featurette
Director:
- Robert Greenwald
(Breaking Up, Bud & Bill, My Dark Places, Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s War on Journalism, Steal This Movie, Sweet Hearts Dance, Uncovered: The War on Iraq, Xanadu)
Producer:
- Robert Greenwald
Music:
- Nicholas O’Toole
‘Outfoxed’ is a fascinating analysis of the behaviour of Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News network in the run-up to the 2004 Presidential election.
The documentary was recorded and released before the election, although the inevitable happened anyway, and as it begins, it likens the Bush government to the Mafia and as it goes on we get to see that the Fox News channel is like a cosa nostra of its own, like many companies, in that if your face doesn’t fit or you try to rock the boat, then as comments from many former Fox News contributors, reporters, producers and newscasters prove, if you don’t tow the party line, “you’re history”.
One contributor says, “What the public learn about Kerry and Bush is what the media decide to show them”, so it’s similar to Big Brother then(!), and to show how much the channel has put in to dumbing down, we’re shown former CIA officer and contributor Larry Johnson was told to refer to ‘suicide bombings’ in Israel as ‘homicide bombings’, he rightly thought that was stupid, because the latter term would define any kind of bomb that killed people. After taking things too far in one interview, although he had eight weeks of his post-9/11 contract left to run with them, they simply stopped featuring him.
Murdoch’s a massive supporter of the Republican side of politics and, hence, was a fan of Reagan, so Fox ordered reporter John Du Pre to go to cover the ex-President’s birthday at the Library named after him, a few years ago. However, the only thing that happened all day was when a group of schoolkids turned up for a while. Du Pre was carpeted and suspended for not making it look celebratory enough, despite trying to undesirably bullshit this non-story into a big event for his bosses.
Then there’s Bill O’Reilly, the man who cuts people up by telling them to “Shut up!” when he doesn’t like what he hears, proves what an embarrassment to journalism he is by insulting Jeremy Glick, a young lad whose father was killed in the terrorist tragedy on September 11th 2001, by taking swipes at both his parents and denying that the American government trained the terrorists who caused the situation. All of this can be seen and understood by any level-headed person and it only makes things worse for the so-called journalist when he sees he has no chance of winning the argument and tells the producers to cut Mr Glick’s mic… “out of respect for your father”. What a total fucking arse that aged has-been really is!
In the last half-hour, things move on to the Iraq war, with Fox backing Bush all the way about it being the “war on terror” when it was really just about oil, and that now Saddam’s been removed how everything in the garden is wonderful, eg. Iraqi athletes were able to train for the 2004 Olympic games, Iraqi men could go driving fast cars around like Jeremy Clarkson and how foreign investment is up because Iraq is being rebuilt – despite the obvious bollock Fox News dropped by ignoring the fact that the contracts to rebuild Iraq were already in place before they started the unjust bombings.
What makes things worse for journalism in general came when it was shown that other broadcasters have taken the lead from Fox in going pro-government in a bid to getting a “one hand watches the other”-type boost, hence trying to “Out-Fox” Fox themselves, and end up going similarly down the pan, morally and in terms of content.
When I started watching Outfoxed, I had no idea who any of the reporters and contributors on Fox are or were, but this documentary does a spot-on job of filling you in on who they’re about to discuss before telling you of their faults. Of course, you could also argue that the team behind this documentary will edit things to suit themselves in the name of entertainment, but it does its job nicely, showing how care-free Fox reporters cut guests off mid-speech because they don’t fit in with Fox’s own beliefs.
Don’t be worried about the seemingly short running time of this DVD, since it took me about two hours to fully absorb all the info here, rewinding certain bits to catch every aspect and nuance.
After watching this, I’d like to see the same kind of documentary done about the BBC, aka ‘Blair Broadcasting Corporation’, since it would highlight a lot about what’s wrong in the organisation. And what’s even more sad is you know that our resident Fuckwit-in-Chief, Tony Blair, will get a third term in power despite not deserving it by a long stretch, because there’s a lack of opposition. Smell the similarities…
And as Fox and the Bush administration seem to blend into one, and then looking at the UK political system and our own media, you can see how they’re all starting to collapse on themselves and turn into the complete jokes that were highlighted in the ’80s sitcom that was ahead of its time, Yes Minister, a programme I could never get into at such a young age but on seeing various episodes in the last few years, I realise I don’t have to watch that many of them because… it’s all playing out in front of me on a daily basis.
On a technical note, as Fox News is broadcast in standard 4:3 and this is a project intended for viewing only on video and DVD, the screen ratio is the same. However, at times, the picture is dreadful, appearing shaky during any kind of movement (footage and animation, the latter showing what Murdoch owns now and when he began), indicating a bad NTSC-to-PAL conversion. So, why not just leave it in NTSC? Everyone with a brain connects their DVD player to the TV with either SCART or s-video connections so viewing NTSC won’t be a problem.
Zero points for subtitles – there are none, despite the frantic chat – and the menus, since there’s only one and it’s static and silent. I wouldn’t hand out many awards to the DVD’s singular extra, a 29-minute Behind-the-scenes featurette, which does what it needs to do, but couldn’t they have added anything else to the release? Anyway, this piece of supplementary material shows the people who were watching Fox News all the time so they could keep an eye on what was going on. We see all the DVD recorders capturing the output and then how the production team put the required clips all together. And there’s no doubting they did a fantastic job in that.
PICTURE QUALITY
SOUND QUALITY
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OVERALL 
Reviewer of movies, videogames and music since 1994. Aortic valve operation survivor from the same year. Running DVDfever.co.uk since 2000. Nobel Peace Prize winner 2021.