Freedom of the press is limited to those who own one.
– A.J. Liebling

H, RUPERT MURDOCH. THE WILY Australian whose Fox News Channel is the subject of Robert Greenwald’s provocative documentary, Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s War on Journalism, makes a few quick appearances in the film, but the most telling has Murdoch, appearing on his own channel, commenting, “the economy’s behaving like it’s on steroids at the moment.”

Meanwhile, the stock ticker in the lower right-hand corner shows a 70-point drop in the Dow.

Granted, that’s not exactly a Black Friday number, but the telling juxtaposition of the “Fox reality” and the real reality – you know, that world of often inconvenient facts that the rest of us have to live in – is what Outfoxed is all about. If Fox News ever retires the venerable “Fair and Balanced” tagline, they might consider adopting, “Fox News: We Make the News.” As former anchor Jon Du Pre puts it, “We weren’t necessarily, as it was told to us, a news-gathering organization as we were a proponent of a point of view.”

That attitude reaches all the way to the top. Director Greenwald makes extensive use of memoranda written by John Moody, chief of Fox News, setting the daily tone of FNC’s coverage. Moody’s memos are a great example of Republican message control, right down to the reminders to reporters that Marine snipers are “sharpshooters” and suicide bombers are, in actuality, “homicide bombers.” Moody cautions his subordinates about the 9/11 commission investigations, “Do not turn this into Watergate.”

The factual gap between Fox-reality and real-reality can be both funny and frightening. When Rupert Murdoch talks about a fantasy boom economy, or when Du Pre’s reports on Reagan’s birthday reveal that, in actuality, no one outside the Republican Party cares about the former president’s “special day,” it’s funny. It’s funny that Fox quizzes a French intellectual about John Kerry’s supposed “Frenchness,” or that they run a piece on the newest summer fashion, John Kerry flip-flops. (Fair and Balanced? How about some coverage of the newest craze in feminine hygiene – George Bush douchebags?)
It’s funny until you realize just how much power Fox News has in shaping public opinion. Then it becomes frightening. Let’s not forget that it was Fox News – John Ellis, George W. Bush’s first cousin (coincidentally!) – who first called Florida “a clear win” for GWB. Fox News announced Junior Shrub President, and within minutes the other networks agreed. Fox-reality became real-reality.

Roger Ailes, Fox News CEO and Chairman, later apologized for making a call that “let our viewers down.” And boy, was he putting on a brave face, barely holding back the tears (of laughter!) welling up inside him.
After the election, of course, the bitterly anti-Clinton Faux News Channel began its long, slow-motion fellatio of the President, with the kind of fawning coverage a mongoloid preschooler would find intellectually offensive. Moody’s memos, after all, are issued by the same network Bill O’Reilly hopes you’ll “rely on for the truth,” without ideological spin. At Fox News there’s nothing but spin, an orbiting ring of bullshit held in place by the gravity of faith.

The money shot across the face of the American public came (!) in the form of a 2003 PIPA/Knowledge Networks poll, which found a direct correlation between the amount of Fox News watched and the degree of confusion about basic matters of fact. Regular Fox News viewers were three times as likely to believe we’d found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, for example. They were seven times as likely to believe the world had supported the war in Iraq.

In other words, Fox News viewers live in another world.
Increasingly, though, we all live in another world, where what we think we know is defined by a small group of multinational corporations who don’t always have our best interests at heart. That’s the point in Robert Kane Pappas’ one-man production Orwell Rolls in His Grave, a nearly two-hour long broadside against the evils of Big Media. Fox News may be the most blatant example of a malicious funhouse mirror masquerading as journalism, but for Pappas the others aren’t much better.

Return, for example, to that fated election night in November, 2000. Fox News may have called the election for Bush, but why did the other networks follow suit so quickly? One explanation may have been simple fear: The other networks were afraid of getting scooped. But there’s another, darker explanation. On the night of the election, GE CEO Jack Welch, a Republican, came into the studios of NBC – owned by GE – and ordered them to call the election for Bush. This is all on tape, but when California Representative Henry Waxman requested NBC turn over those videotapes, the network refused. To do so, they said, would be a “highly inappropriate” expose of their editorial process.

How much do you trust a media outlet that 1) lets CEOs make editorial decisions, and 2) refuses to allow any investigation into those decisions, and then 3) cites First Amendment rights to protect themselves from critique?
This is nothing new – media consolidation has been going on for at least the last 50 years. But as one commentator puts it “media is the nervous system of a democracy,” and as the nervous system becomes hyper-stimulated, firing that same Bennifer neuron over and over again, is it any surprise our politics become the gossipy, scandal-driven realm of Lewinsky and “Friends?”

Meanwhile, behind the scenes and under our noses, media companies employ the largest lobbying force in America. Pappas explains how media “deregulation,” begun in the Reagan years but continuing into the present, has given rise to the mega-media that surrounds us. The loosening of restrictions gives media more space from which to increase its power, by propagandizing to the public and defining who can say within its space. The major media is, for the majority of Americans who don’t spend hours on the Internet stoking their indignation with articles by Greg Palast or Michael Moore, the gatekeeper to public discourse. It’s at Disney-GE-Sony world, and as Harlan Ellison put it, “At Disney, nobody fucks with the Mouse.”

It’s enough to make you cry. But what good are tears if they’re not wept on TV?

Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s War on Journalism is in theaters now and available on DVD at www.disinfo.com. Orwell Rolls In His Grave is available on DVD at www.orwellrollsinhisgrave.com.

– CHANTRELLE FONTAIN