Conservatives have complained about the liberal bias of the media for years.
But now that there’s some intellectual diversity in the media the liberals are hollering like stuck pigs.
Fox News, whose slogan is, “We Report, You Decide,” drives them bonkers because many of the people who work there don’t share the set of biases held by those in the three other big networks.
The presence of Fox offends them–they fear it will push them to the middle because Fox is pulling in a growing number of discontented viewers–and so they are all thrilled about the advent of Robert Greenwald’s movie about Fox called “Outfoxed.”
Fox has dinted the hegemony that, as the headline of a Wall Street Journal op-ed puts it, meant that the unspoken slogan of the three networks might well have been, “They Report, They Decide.”
The article in the Journal reports on a well-nigh hysterical conference on the movie “Outfoxed” that included such stars as former conservative columnist Arianna Huffington, liberal columnist Eric Alterman of the Nation and John Podesta from the Clinton White House.
“Media consolidation was the panel’s ostensible topic,” writes Steven Zeitchik. “The panelists put forth such profound ideas as ’bigness is, by its nature, anti-journalism,’ such revelatory nuggets as ’you don’t have to be liberal to be a good journalist,’ and such grudging concessions as ’[Rupert] Murdoch is not Dr. Strangelove and Fox is not the bomb,’ although Mr. Murdoch may be a ’rat’ who has thrived in the aftermath of supposed media catastrophe.”
Nicholas Leman tried to explain that Fox grew out of a feeling by many that there was a liberal media consolidation, but apparently he was unable to calm them down.
Zeitchik has an interesting take on sudden vogue of documentaries such as “Outfoxed,” “Fahrenheit 9/11,” and “Control Room,” a new film about Al-Jazeera, the viciously anti-American Arab network:
“Yet to call these films propaganda is also to misunderstand them. They don’t seek to convince the unconvinced or herd the untamed. They aim directly at the sheep. Little wonder that the main means of distributing ’Outfoxed’ is through house parties organized by MoveOn.org, the group whose Bush-bashing is at least as bald-faced as anything on Fox. Call them flockumentaries, movies people attend en masse, to nestle together in easy confirmation of their most cherished beliefs–to learn, really, what they already know.”