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Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War On Journalism
R4 - Australia - DV1 Review written by and copyright: Noor Razzak (1st March 2005). |
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The Film
 Documentary filmmaker Robert Greenwald is probably better know (if know at all) for his TV and film work that includes the camp roller boogie movie Xanadu starring Olivia Newton-John. The last few years Greenwald has focused his attention to documentary filmmaking, creating often captivating, eye-opening and shocking films that uncover scandal, secrets and facts that governments don’t want you to know about. More specifically the films Uncovered: The Whole Truth About the Iraq War (2003) and it’s follow-up Uncovered: The War On Iraq (2004), which was basically a re-edited longer version of the former. Both incarnations became a grassroots hit among film festival viewers and were subsequently released for major theatrical release, however in the year of Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11, Uncovered: The War On Iraq was largely overlooked. In the same year Greenwald focused his attention towards Rupert Murdoch’s Fox New Channel, exposing the truth behind their Fair and Balanced reporting slogan. This film Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s War On Journalism basically attempts to reveal Fox’s unorthodox reporting of ‘News’ and more importantly what constitutes as ‘News’, passing opinion as fact seems to be an everyday occurrence at Fox. The film’s synopsis describes it well by stating that Outfoxed examines how Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News Channel has been running a ‘race to the bottom’ in television news journalism. The film provides an in-depth look at the Fox News Channel and the increasing dangers to democracy when multi-national corporations take control of the public’s right to know. It is an expose of the moral and ethical corruption inside Fox News, Outfoxed reveals the tricks-of-the-trade implemented to manipulate and influence the viewing public. Featuring interviews with former Fox News producers, reporters, bookers and writers who discuss being forcefully coerced to push a ‘right-wing point of view’ or risk loosing their jobs and livelihoods, Outfoxed exposes the shocking hypocrisy behind Fox News Channel’s ‘Fair and Balanced’ slogan. Greenwald and his team essentially went covert while making this film, as they didn’t want Fox to know about it in an attempt to protect the film and its sources as well as to prevent the film form being made by not allowing the use of footage from their broadcasts. So Greenwald and a group of volunteers who watched Fox News constantly in shifts started to do their research, while everything on that channel was recorded and archived during the period of the film’s production. Greenwald weaves an interesting perspective that will leave you frustrated and down right angry not at the film itself but at the practices Fox News partakes. His case is quite compelling and everything is supported by actual clips taken right off the news networks own shows, one in particular from the highly rated Bill O’Rielly show The O’Reilly Factor will get your blood levels rising as he bashes a young man’s views on the Afghanistan war after 9/11. It’s no doubt that this is certainly an eye-opening film especially for those that watch Fox news regularly, however I found that many times during the course of the film Greenwald used the same propagandistic editing style utilised by Fox to get the point across, whether this was a deliberate attempt to mock Fox or not I can’t help but feel that Greenwald resorted to the same cheap shots and tricks that he was exposing. Despite this, Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s War on Journalism rates as one of the best documentaries released last year, at its heart it’s shocking, entertaining, informative and quite clever. Greenwald certainly hit the mark with this one and hopefully there will be more in the future.
Video
Presented in the film’s original 1.33:1 full screen ratio. The transfer for the most part is generally quite good, the image quality does shuffle from excellent to not so good, which there is reason for, as I’ll explain. The documentary is contained of two major parts the interviews and the clips from Fox. The interviews and research segments of this documentary were all shot on DV and the quality of that image is super sharp I have no doubt that the transfer was created with the use of the original DV elements. The colours are bright and black levels (of which there aren’t many) are well defined. The clips taken from the Fox News Channel on the other hand aren’t as sharp as one would expect, the image is occasionally fuzzy and does sometimes feature pixels that can be annoying, however this is no fault of the transfer itself but rather the source material for these clips were recorded from the TV signal and not ones sourced from Fox themselves. So this is not really a major issue, overall for a low budget documentary this transfer is more than suitable.
Audio
The film features only an English Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo soundtrack, which I believe was a good choice as a 5.1 track would have been a complete waist. Since this is a dialogue driven film it is important that it remains clear and distortion free thorough the duration of the film and I am glad to report that this track does the trick, there were hardly any flaws that I could pick up in this track, additionally musical cues were well mixed and are never a distraction over the dialogue, well done. This disc unfortunately does not include any subtitles, which is bad news for those with hearing difficulties.
Extras
First up we have an exclusive message from the director Robert Greenwald, consisting of two text pages this letter addressed to the viewer is a brief introduction to what you are about to see and a description of the process that was undertaken to make this film and keep it’s knowledge secret from Fox. A director’s biography follows that, which is a single text page of brief notes regarding the Robert Greenwald’s career. The first video extra we encounter is the film’s theatrical trailer, presented in 1.33:1 and in English Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo sound with a runtime of 2 minutes 27 seconds. The real meat of this DVD is the featurette entitled The Making Of Outfoxed this 29 minute 7 second piece is very well made and covers the entire making of process in a short amount of time. The featurette includes behind-the-scenes footage of production meetings, interviews with various people that volunteered to watch Fox News for the research, the production team and goes into detail regarding the production management level, the gathering of information, the co-ordination of interviews, the editing and creation of graphic for the different segments of the documentary. This featurette will tell you all you need to know about the film in under half an hour and is far better than most EPK featurettes seen on many DVDs. Finally we also have the DVD credits, consists of a single text page with contact information. Although the featurette included some excellent information regarding the film I was left with wanting more, an audio commentary would have been a wise choice considering the controversial subject matter, Greenwald’s own insight into the film would have made for a very interesting listen, another omission that I noticed was that there were no deleted scenes, surely extended interviews and cut scenes exist somewhere. Perhaps one day we’ll see a Special Edition, but for now this edition will do nicely.
Overall
Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s War On Journalism does what it’s meant to do, open your eyes and gives added meaning to the old phrase Don’t believe everything you hear, Greenwald’s dissection of Fox News’ Fair and Balanced reporting Blows the doors of Rupert Murdoch’s network wide open and exposes their biased and often unfair reporting techniques, this film is a must see. DV1’s disc includes a very good transfer with an equally good soundtrack, although the extras a little light the featurette is a real highlight.
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