OutFOXed

[Stabby]

They were talking about this new documentery on Democracy Now! today.

http://www.outfoxed.org/

Outfoxed examines how media empires, led by Rupert Murdoch's Fox News, have been running a 'race to the bottom' in television news. This film provides an in-depth look at Fox News and the dangers of ever-enlarging corporations taking control of the public's right to know.

Outfoxed first examines media mogul Rupert Murdoch and the Australian company, News Corp., tracing how the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) helped Murdoch break the rules to establish a fourth network in the United States. The film explores Murdoch's burgeoning kingdom and the impact on society when a broad swath of media is controlled by one person.

Media experts, including Walter Cronkite, Jeff Cohen (FAIR), Bob McChesney and Chellie Pingree, provide context and guidance for the story of Fox News and its effect on society.

The team behind Outfoxed created a system to monitor Fox News 24-hours-a-day for months to discover exactly how its shows worked. A team of volunteers around the country scrutinized every hour of Fox News programming, noting examples of bias in its coverage. The result is an intense examination of Fox News and the lie inherent in its favorite motto: 'Fair and Balanced.'

They were playing some clips of it on the air. One that I thought was great is how FOX countinues to say that John Kerry looks 'French' in order to smear him in some way as they campaign for Bush (they also had evidence that almost every producer and repoter at FOX had contributed to the Bush campaign). They had like 20 or 30 sound clips of reporters saying "John Kerry, who looks French...." and "Kerry, he looks a little French... It cracked me up the depth they sink to.

This is coming right off the heels of a FAIR report on FOX news also:
http://www.fair.org/extra/0407/special-report.html

FAIR’s latest study of Fox’s Special Report with Brit Hume finds the network’s flagship news show still listing right—heavily favoring conservative and Republican guests in its one-on-one interviews. And, according to the study, Special Report rarely features women or non-white guests in these prominent newsmaker inter-view spots.
....
Fifty-seven percent of Special Report’s one-on-one guests during the period studied were ideological conservatives, 12 percent were centrists and 11 percent were progressives.

Twenty percent of guests were non-ideological. Among ideological guests, conservatives accounted for 72 percent, while centrists made up 15 percent and progressives 14 percent. (The total exceeds 100 percent due to rounding.) Viewers were roughly five times more likely to see a conservative interviewed on Special Report than a progressive.
....
Conservatives often defend Fox’s rightward slant by claiming that it simply counterbalances a predominantly left-leaning media. But previous FAIR studies have found that, across the supposedly “liberal” media, Republican sources dominate—and Fox simply skews even farther to the right.

FAIR’s original 2001 study of Special Report (Extra!, 7–8/01) included a comparison to CNN’s Wolf Blitzer Reports—which favored Republicans 57 to 43 percent. And a 2002 FAIR study of the three major networks’ nightly news broadcasts (Extra!, 5–6/02) found an even greater imbalance than on CNN: Of partisan sources, 75 percent were Republican and only 24 percent Democrats. The differences among the networks were negligible; CBS had the most Republicans (76 percent) while ABC had the fewest (73 percent).

Even NPR, characterized by conservative critics as “liberal” radio, favored Republican sources over Democrats by a ratio of more than three to two in a recent study of its main news shows (Extra!, 5-6/04). And Republican political domination doesn’t explain the imbalance: In FAIR’s 1993 study of NPR (Extra!, 4–5/93) , when Democrats controlled the White House and both houses of Congress, Republicans still outnumbered Democrats 57 to 42 percent.—S.R. and J.H.

[Preechr]

You might find this interesting, then...