Documentary charges Fox with bias (hence you have Rove CBS play)

Monday, July 12, 2004


Documentary charges Fox with bias


By Mark Memmott / USA Today

Another documentary joins the political debate Monday when “Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s War on Journalism” is unveiled in New York.

“Outfoxed,” which is being promoted by the liberal advocacy group MoveOn, charges that Fox News executives order their cable TV anchors, reporters and producers to slant the news to be pro-Republican and pro-Bush administration.

Fox News, which says it is the “fair and balanced” network, has long been accused by Democrats and liberals of having a conservative bias. “Outfoxed “adds to that debate through interviews with former Fox correspondents and producers, as well as memos written by Fox executives.

The memos, for example, portray Fox executives urging correspondents to remind viewers the United States “is in Iraq to help a country brutalized for 30 years protect the gains made by Operation Iraqi Freedom” -- an argument for the war that is similar to the Bush administration’s.

However, “Outfoxed” does not mention other memos its researchers obtained from Fox News staffers. Those memos, shown to USA TODAY, remind correspondents to give equal emphasis to speeches by President Bush and his opponent, Sen. John Kerry.

http://www.detnews.com/2004/screens/0407/14/-209704.htm


Classic Rovian play...Fox is being attacked...so what happens...set up CBS.

Where are the networks talking about "Outfoxed"....you won't see them.

"What we found is not that FOX is a conservative network, but that it's a network that follows the party line of the Bush administration," said "Outfoxed" (search) filmmaker Robert Greenwald, a Hollywood producer-director whose credits include the 2003 documentary "Uncovered: The Whole Truth About the Iraq War" and such TV films as "The Crooked E: The Unshredded Truth about Enron" and "Blonde," a biopic of Marilyn Monroe (search).

Greenwald said he decided to make the film after hearing numerous journalists refer to the "Foxification" of the news. That approach, he says, has served the 8-year-old FOX News Channel well, and "put pressure on many of the other networks to move in the same direction: cheap news, ranting and raving, pseudo-patriotism."

snip

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,125455,00.html

And during an interview on NBC's Meet the Press (9/14/03), when Vice President Dick Cheney was asked if he was "surprised" that so many Americans connected Iraq to the 9/11 attacks, Cheney responded:

"No. I think it's not surprising that people make that connection.... You and I talked about this two years ago. I can remember you asking me this question just a few days after the original attack. At the time I said no, we didn't have any evidence of that. We've learned a couple of things. We learned more and more that there was a relationship between Iraq and Al Qaeda that stretched back through most of the decade of the '90s, that it involved training, for example, on BW and CW , that Al Qaeda sent personnel to Baghdad to get trained on the systems that are involved. The Iraqis providing bomb-making expertise and advice to the Al Qaeda organization."

Clearly, Cheney was describing exactly the sort of "collaborative relationship" that the September 11 commission now says that Iraq did not have with Al Qaeda, and stating that this relationship makes it "not surprising" that people would connect Iraq with the September 11 attacks.

But Fox kept advancing the notion that the commission's report actually backed up what the Bush administration has been saying. Hume explained that Bush has long denied a connection between Iraq and the 9/11 attacks, while maintaining that "There's no question that Saddam Hussein had Al Qaeda ties." This is, according to Hume, "an assertion the commission's report actually supports."

http://www.fair.org/activism/fox-commission.html

where is the "outing" of Fox news editors on this?