Country:
USA
Recognizable Faces:
All the fuckface crew from Fox News...
Bill O'Reilly
Sean Hannity
Britt Hume
etc.
Directed by:
Robert Greenwald
I'll be the first to admit, I don't take enough interest in shit that matters. Politicians are sometimes boring me so hard that I was to pluck my eyes out. It's a Canadian thing. In the U.S, it's always more rowdy and filled with bad guys you can really hate for who they are and not just because they are impotent. Fox News are part of this fun-loving(NOT) meanie crew. I might get bored easily by questions no one wants to solve (A.K.A. Politics) but media and manipulation of information is more interesting to me. So it is to Fox News.
STORYTELLING
Outfoxed goes back to root of the problem. Rupert Murdoch. He bought Fox News Channel in the eighties and despite not touching it at first, he ended up turning this behemoth into a propaganda machine for the conservative right wingers. Twenty years later, Murdoch changed this channel into a glorious, but extremely biaised channel where republicans can do whatever they please.
Robert Greenwald's documentary goes in depht in the inner workings of Fox News and explains how internal memos and pressure from the upper floor are forcing the working staff into a predetermined line of thoughts. Greenwald also explains that Murdoch is such on a right wing mind because of a scuffle he has with Bobby Kennedy in the sixties. Moguls and anti-trust are a bad mix. Moguls and leftist politicians...come to think about it.
We get treated with the whole treatment of Fox News indoctrination. Fallacious arguments, bias, insults (O'Reilly's trademark "Shut Up")...there is nothing that they don't do to expose their point of view as right. Of course, the big joke in all of this is the news station's catch phrase: "Fair & Balanced"
DIRECTION
Robert Greenwald treats his audience with a by-the-book approach to documentary. Interviews, Interviews and Interviews. All cut by footage from Fox News, sometimes with voice-over narration. This kind of structure for a documentary means that the director had little intention for aesthetics. He wanted to put the emphasis on the message instead so he crammed as much footage and opinion of documented experts on tape on the eighty minutes that makes his movie. It's a little dazzling and confusing at first, but the same experts come back and back so there's only a limited crew at the end.
ACTING
Documentaries are rarely objective. Here, the point of view is leftist, but Robert Greenwald has the decency to make people talk for themselves. The likes of O'Reilly and Hannity are dumb enough to make fool of themselves on their own. Focus alternates between the Fox News point of view with the archive footage and the analysis from the experts called on the bat by Greenwald. The left has a step back and a broader perspective, but there is a conscious effort made by Robert Greenwald to keep from influencing his viewers.
INTEREST
It's not a great piece of art, but it's crammed full of information and insight on one of the biggest problem mills in the Occidental Society. Outfoxed; Rupert Murdoch's War On Journalism
is more of a weapon than a work of art. It's not a movie you'll like to watch over and over again, but it's not wasted time and energy to sit down and watch it.
SCORE: B
