Outfoxed (Robert Greenwald 2004)
Posted on April 13 at 17.32, 2007 by Eric Mahleb
Robert Greenwald is a busy man. Over the past several years, he has directed, produced or helped bring to the screen a slew of documentaries and films with a social angle, garnering award nominations by the dozens. Some of these titles include: Unprecedented: The 2000 Presidential Election (2002), Uncovered: The Iraq War (2003), The Crooked E: The Unshredded Truth About Enron (2003), Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price (2005), Iraq for Sale: The War Profiteers (2006), and Outfoxed, Rupert Murdoch’s War on Journalism (2005).
As is always the case with these documentaries, I hope they reach the right audience. I was already well aware of Murdoch’s deceptive tactics and techniques, and particularly, of his main messenger in the US, the Fox News Network. I also got to experience another Murdoch property, the Sun newspaper in London, which was enough to make me ponder human nature and the true meaning of intelligence.
As I watched Outfoxed, I kept wondering how certain people who seem to share with their fellow human beings so many common characteristics, who look similar, talk similar, have similar habits and who appear to be gifted with a certain intelligence (at least those parts of intelligence that allow one to learn and retain facts, and to communicate in a fairly clear manner), can at the same time be so different and so capable of drawing opposite conclusions and theories?
Another question that was on my mind during the viewing was: how many of these people at Fox do what they do with the full belief that what they are doing is right and just and that it involves no deception, and how many do it knowing full well that they are being deceptive and controlling? It is likely that the latter is dominated by people in the higher levels of the company and the former by the lower echelons. Journalists, I suppose along with doctors and scientists, are supposedly bound by a code of ethics. Fox (and The Sun, and some of the other media outlets within Murdoch’s empire) seems to think that these ethics are not applicable to them. They are re-inventing the role of journalism, and in the process, taking us further down the path of mistrust, brainwashing and corporate control of information, and in fact, of reality. Fox is taking Baudrillard’s concept of simulation of reality to a new level, using mass media to create an artificial and modelled reality that feeds on the naivety of its viewers and readers. Manipulation of the masses has always been a favourite means of propaganda and a tool of dictatorial regimes. The US Republican party has found its tool and is using it under the banners of freedom and fairness. Suddenly, the worlds of THX 1138, Orwell’s 1984, Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale don’t feel so far away (see my essay on architectural representations of utopias and dystopias in cinema).
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