Tuesday, July 13, 2004

unFair & unBalanced

There's a good NYT Magazine article on Robert Greenwald's newest documentary -- Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism. I particularly like this account on how the Greenwald put the documentary together:

"Outfoxed" was made in an unusually collaborative fashion. In January, Greenwald rigged up a dozen DVD recorders and programmed them to record Fox News 24 hours a day, seven days a week, for about six months. After scrutinizing the initial footage, Greenwald and a team of researchers compiled a list of what they saw as Fox's telltale themes and techniques: stories questioning the patriotism of liberals; relentlessly upbeat reports on Iraq; belligerent hosts who scream at noncompliant guests. Greenwald planned for the list's categories eventually to become organizing sections of the film. As he envisioned it, the film clips grouped by theme, together with voice-overs and commentary, would lay bare Fox's tactics, frame by frame.

Once the list of categories was complete, Greenwald asked MoveOn to round up 10 volunteers, each of whom was assigned a particular time slot during the day to monitor Fox, so that the network's news stories or commentaries were under observation virtually 24 hours a day. When a MoveOn volunteer would spot an example of footage that fit one of Greenwald's categories, he would note the date and precise time and send the information in an e-mail message to Greenwald, who had an assistant code it and transfer it to a spreadsheet.

By May, Greenwald had received enough examples to construct a rough outline of the film. He then hired five editors -- politically passionate filmmakers who can command up to $1,000 a day for TV commercials and movie trailers but who accepted $150 a day for the chance to work on the project. In the evenings, two editors would consult Greenwald's spreadsheets and locate the flagged footage in his vast library of Fox News segments. During the day, the three other editors worked simultaneously on separate parts of the movie, stitching together a coherent narrative from the Fox clips as well as interviews that Greenwald conducted with former Fox employees (some of them disguised to protect their identities) and commentators like the former CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite and the liberal media critics Mark Crispin Miller and Eric Alterman. At the end of each day, the editors posted their work on a secure Web site for Greenwald's review.

Did you know that for the price of a movie ($10 in San Francisco these days, but the DVDs are actually only a mere $9.95) you can purchase the DVD from these sites? And if you can't afford the movie, attend a free house party screening this Sunday. As they say -- let the facts speak for themselves... And, speaking of facts -- here's Michael Moore's fact checks/ substantiation for material used in Fahrenheit 9/11.

posted by claudine |Added at 3:22 PM| | politics, media bias, fox