MovoOn.org documentary "Outfoxed" takes on Fox New

[Midnight_Son]

http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1000560057

Just as press coverage of the Michael Moore film “Fahrenheit 9/11” starts to fade, another partisan project targeting conservatives was announced today, this one aimed at Fox News.

The activist group MoveOn.org has produced a documentary film called “Outfoxed” that, it claims, “exposes Fox for what it is: partisan spin, not news.” The film purportedly includes interviews with seven ex-Fox News employees “who describe how, every day, highly partisan talking points are drawn up to influence newscasts.”

The movie, directed by Robert Greenwald, will premiere at MoveOn houses parties around the country on July 18. Al Franken will weigh in on a conference call that night, as participants, the group says, “plan out how we’ll take on Fox and take back our media.”

Fox had no immediate comment.

Partners in the venture include Fairness and Accurancy in Reporting, Media Matters for America, and the Center for American Progress.

I haven’t watched Faux News since it became obvious they are a right wing political org instead of a news service.

[Jeremy_Johnsen]

This will make a huge splash with all the people that don’t watch Fox. The question is, how are they going to get the people to watch it that need to see it?

[Linoleum]

@Jeremy_Johnsen

This will make a huge splash with all the people that don’t watch Fox. The question is, how are they going to get the people to watch it that need to see it?

You mean, getting people to watch the correct partisan source? :lol:

[Midnight_Son]

Nope. Impartial news reporting is just fine with me.

[quatoria]

@Linoleum

[quote=Jeremy Johnsen]This will make a huge splash with all the people that don’t watch Fox. The question is, how are they going to get the people to watch it that need to see it?

You mean, getting people to watch the correct partisan source? :lol:[/quote]

One of the great successes of the right wing ‘media revolution’ was getting the general populace to believe that news is nothing more than a set of competing partisan opinions, each biased in a different direction. Once even the concept of fair, accurate, and impartial reporting had been discarded as a thing of value, networks like Fox were free to spring up - and any report accurately describing what it is that Fox does could simply be dismissed as a partisan attack. It’s a neat trick - working the ref, on a national scale.

[Midnight_Son]

Fox News: The Christian Al Jazeera.

[Andrew_Mayer]

@quatoria

One of the great successes of the right wing ‘media revolution’ was getting the general populace to believe that news is nothing more than a set of competing partisan opinions, each biased in a different direction. Once even the concept of fair, accurate, and impartial reporting had been discarded as a thing of value, networks like Fox were free to spring up - and any report accurately describing what it is that Fox does could simply be dismissed as a partisan attack. It’s a neat trick - working the ref, on a national scale.

Let’s not forget that a great swath of the press, excited to be freed from the labour of having to do the work of actual reporting, gleefully joined in.

[Lizard_King]

@quatoria

One of the great successes of the right wing ‘media revolution’ was getting the general populace to believe that news is nothing more than a set of competing partisan opinions, each biased in a different direction. Once even the concept of fair, accurate, and impartial reporting had been discarded as a thing of value, networks like Fox were free to spring up - and any report accurately describing what it is that Fox does could simply be dismissed as a partisan attack. It’s a neat trick - working the ref, on a national scale.

Oh, please. As usual, people that share your opinions are objective, and those who don’t are biased. That’s really not much of a trick.

[Andrew_Mayer]

@Lizard_King

[quote=quatoria]One of the great successes of the right wing ‘media revolution’ was getting the general populace to believe that news is nothing more than a set of competing partisan opinions, each biased in a different direction. Once even the concept of fair, accurate, and impartial reporting had been discarded as a thing of value, networks like Fox were free to spring up - and any report accurately describing what it is that Fox does could simply be dismissed as a partisan attack. It’s a neat trick - working the ref, on a national scale.

Oh, please. As usual, people that share your opinions are objective, and those who don’t are biased. That’s really not much of a trick.[/quote]

And arguing the argument instead of the facts isn’t much of an argument.

[Andrew_Mayer]

But the “Liberal Media” screed machine is cranking it up again.

Conservatives across the country decry news coverage of the war as relentlessly and unfairly negative. Last week Brent Bozell, a conservative activist, launched a $2.8 million advertising and talk-radio campaign to discredit the “liberal news media.”

2.8 million dollars to discredit the news media. Yeah, it must be my bias and paranoia that are making me see things.

[Jason_McCullough]

@Lizard_King

[quote=quatoria]One of the great successes of the right wing ‘media revolution’ was getting the general populace to believe that news is nothing more than a set of competing partisan opinions, each biased in a different direction. Once even the concept of fair, accurate, and impartial reporting had been discarded as a thing of value, networks like Fox were free to spring up - and any report accurately describing what it is that Fox does could simply be dismissed as a partisan attack. It’s a neat trick - working the ref, on a national scale.

Oh, please. As usual, people that share your opinions are objective, and those who don’t are biased. That’s really not much of a trick.[/quote]

http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?pt=87ZOPwwqxUtOFjp6lJXV%2Bh%3D%3D

If you’ve got a refutation of that article, I’d love to hear it.

[Midnight_Son]

Gee, while many reporters are liberal, the bosses of media companies are almost always rich white conservatives. And, being the boss, they actually control what gets seen and read. This is a key point that gets conveniently overlooked again and again and again…

[Jason_McCullough]

And those “liberal” reporters are actually only cultural liberals; their economic views are to the right of the median.

[Euri]

@Jason_McCullough1

http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?pt=87ZOPwwqxUtOFjp6lJXV%2Bh%3D%3D

If you’ve got a refutation of that article, I’d love to hear it.

Extremely interesting link, thanks.

[Ben]

Jason- Uh, I read that article until the author used the word “Bushies.” If you could translate his point into adult that would be cool.

[Jason_McCullough]

Huh?

Edit: is “Clintonites” childish?

[quatoria]

@Jason_McCullough1

Huh?

Let me translate Ben’s point, Jason - “I read that article until I began to think it might tell me something I wouldn’t like, and then I quit. Could you tell me what it said, so I can call you an idiot?”

[Lizard_King]

@Jason_McCullough1

http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?pt=87ZOPwwqxUtOFjp6lJXV%2Bh%3D%3D

If you’ve got a refutation of that article, I’d love to hear it.

Only if you explain what relevance it has to the matter at hand. I mean, I guess I could cite completely tangential opinion pieces and demand you refute them for no particular reason, but it seems like it’s asking for a lot of work in return for a link. How about you tell me which part it is you’re expecting me to get my proverbial panties in a wad about?
I mean, I read Harper’s Bazaar every month, it’s not like you’re stunning me with the whole Strauss-Bush thesis here.

@Andrew_Mayer

And arguing the argument instead of the facts isn’t much of an argument.

Oh, please, we’ve all been down this road many times, and it is quite obvious that it comes down to a foundational issue of perspective. There are those people that are skeptical of all news media, especially those that claim greater objectivity, and then there are those that are skeptical only of those that disagree with their own worldview. And then there is a subsection of the latter that blame any subjectivization of the news media on Fox, as if it were not only a new phenomenon but a strictly conservative one.
And 2.8 million dollars really is a drop in the bucket. I’m more convinced than ever before that talk radio in particular and punditry in general has become more of a form of entertainment than anywhere in particular that serious political decisions come from. I mean, there are always going to be those people that vote as a result of the randomest shit, but the flock of opinioneers sweeping the media these days are just obnoxious, not exceptionally influential.

[Ben]

Jason- Yes, “Clintonites” is also immature. Crazy at it may be for me to take this stance, but I began to doubt the objectivityand seriousness of the author at that point. I don’t think Midnight Son offers nuanced political analysis. Anyway, LK didn’t get why you posted it either, so could you distill the point of the article into a neat paragraph? Finding an article on the internet that is critical of the Bush administration is not really newsworthy, so I assume you had a motive behind linking it.

quatoria- Isn’t that precisely the attitude you were supporting with your whining about how the conservatives invented the myth of biased media, then created their own biased media to distract the public from the unfiltered truth of Pravda?

[Jason_McCullough]

Ben, I don’t see it. I and others on the left use “Clintonites” all the time as a shorthand. What, “people who used to work for the Clinton administration in some capacity or really liked him” is better?

Anyway, LK didn’t get why you posted it either, so could you distill the point of the article into a neat paragraph?

The conservative media has taken the postmodernist approach - nothing is objective reality; it’s all just intrepretation; everyone has an agenda - and cranked it up to 11, to the point that Bush literally refuses to listen to experts on any topic.

Lack of post-war reconstruction: ignoring the experts in favor of ideological fantasies. Threatening to fire that guy if he released an accurate Medicare cost estimate, completely locking out policy experts from the SOTU process, overriding the FDA decision on the morning-after pill, booting the CEA out of the White House, refusing to believe the CIA’s assessment of Iraq, the politicalization of the CBO, fucking up the EPA’s carefully researched paper on global warming - all cases of knowledgable experts being ignored because the facts conflicted with ideology.

I think it’s orthogonal to the Strauss thing.

Movement conservatives, near as I can tell, have responded to reality not going their way by inventing ever-more-fanciful ideological just-so stories and accusations of bad incentives and corruption on the part of non-ideological researchers. It’s kind of like how Marxists insist on the whole “false consciousness” thing to explain why none of their theories pan out. Eventually the whole artifice has to come crashing down on them, but I guess we’re going to find out how much Lysenkoism society can take before that happens.

It’s not like Bush invented this; as the article points out, the good neoconservative corrective back in the 1970s that “science and analysis can’t solve everything” has mutated into “all science and analysis is a corrupt attempt to shove liberalism down our throats.”

The bit where Nixon invites Galbraith & Friedman into his office to argue their respective cases is illustrative: Bush would no more do that than grow wings.