Saturday, July 10

NY Times Magazine Previews "Outfoxed"

A profile of Robert Greenwald and "Outfoxed":
''Outfoxed'' has been made in secret. The film is an obsessively researched expose of the ways in which Fox News, as Greenwald sees it, distorts its coverage to serve the conservative political agenda of its owner, the media tycoon Rupert Murdoch. It features interviews with former Fox employees, leaked policy memos written by Fox executives and extensive footage from Fox News, which Greenwald is using without the network's permission. The result is an unwavering argument against Fox News that combines the leftist partisan vigor of a Michael Moore film with the sober tone and delivery of a PBS special. A large portion of the film's $300,000 budget came in the form of contributions in the range of $80,000 from both MoveOn and the Center for American Progress, the liberal policy organization founded by John Podesta, the former chief of staff for Bill Clinton; Greenwald, who is not looking to earn any money from the project, provided the rest. [...]

''Outfoxed'' was made in an unusually collaborative fashion. In January, Greenwald rigged up a dozen DVD recorders and programmed them to record Fox News 24 hours a day, seven days a week, for about six months. After scrutinizing the initial footage, Greenwald and a team of researchers compiled a list of what they saw as Fox's telltale themes and techniques: stories questioning the patriotism of liberals; relentlessly upbeat reports on Iraq; belligerent hosts who scream at noncompliant guests. Greenwald planned for the list's categories eventually to become organizing sections of the film. As he envisioned it, the film clips grouped by theme, together with voice-overs and commentary, would lay bare Fox's tactics, frame by frame.

Once the list of categories was complete, Greenwald asked MoveOn to round up 10 volunteers, each of whom was assigned a particular time slot during the day to monitor Fox, so that the network's news stories or commentaries were under observation virtually 24 hours a day. When a MoveOn volunteer would spot an example of footage that fit one of Greenwald's categories, he would note the date and precise time and send the information in an e-mail message to Greenwald, who had an assistant code it and transfer it to a spreadsheet.

By May, Greenwald had received enough examples to construct a rough outline of the film. He then hired five editors -- politically passionate filmmakers who can command up to $1,000 a day for TV commercials and movie trailers but who accepted $150 a day for the chance to work on the project. In the evenings, two editors would consult Greenwald's spreadsheets and locate the flagged footage in his vast library of Fox News segments. During the day, the three other editors worked simultaneously on separate parts of the movie, stitching together a coherent narrative from the Fox clips as well as interviews that Greenwald conducted with former Fox employees (some of them disguised to protect their identities) and commentators like the former CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite and the liberal media critics Mark Crispin Miller and Eric Alterman. At the end of each day, the editors posted their work on a secure Web site for Greenwald's review.

It is not exactly earth-shattering, of course, to learn that Fox is more conservative than other news networks. What ''Outfoxed'' does is detail the specific ways, both onscreen and behind the scenes, in which the network's conservatism shapes its news and opinion programs. The most stinging blow that ''Outfoxed'' delivers to Fox's ''fair and balanced'' claim comes in a segment of the film on the daily memos apparently sent to the entire Fox news operation by John Moody, Fox News's senior vice president for news and editorial. The memos, which Greenwald says were provided by two unnamed employees at the network, set the agenda for how events will be covered. One memo, thought to have been circulated at Fox in April, instructs employees how to report on the increasing number of American fatalities in Iraq: ''Do not fall into the easy trap of mourning the loss of U.S. lives,'' it reads. Another memo outlines the approach to covering the United States military's siege on Falluja: ''It won't be long before some people start to decry the use of 'excessive force,''' it says. ''We won't be among that group.'' A third, on the 9/11 Commission, is equally firm: ''The fact that former Clinton and both former and current Bush administration officials are testifying gives it a certain tension, but this is not 'what did he know and when did he know it' stuff,'' it cautions. ''Do not turn this into Watergate.''