A new documentary attacking Fox News was launched as the US's top papers admit they failed in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq. David Teather reports.
On a steamy Saturday afternoon last weekend, 120 or so people filed into the Quad Cinema in New York's West Village to do something they had probably never done before: watch Fox News.
Or rather, they were watching a documentary about Fox News: an angry evisceration of America's rabidly right-wing 24-hour news channel. The gasps from the liberal audience were frequently audible. Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism is a polemic in the same vein as Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11.
The film rounds on Fox for hiding behind objectivity; although the channel's twin mottos are "We report, you decide" and "Fair and balanced" it hammers home the point that Fox is neither. Clips show anchors ridiculing Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry for looking French (an incalculable insult in the mind of a conservative), counting down the days "until President Bush is re-elected" and brutalising liberal guests. Another anchor chirps that "North Korea loves John Kerry".
"We weren't necessarily, as it was told to us, a news-gathering organisation, so much as we were a proponent of a point of view," says John Du Pre, a former Fox correspondent, in the film.
In one sequence that seems like a bad joke, the veteran anchor Brit Hume stands in front of two maps side by side, one of Iraq, one of California. As he updates on the American dead in the Iraqi conflict, he says,deadpan, that there is more chance of being shot in Burbank than Baghdad. The implication seemed to be that we should stop our liberal handwringing.
The film, the work of Hollywood producer/director Robert Greenwald, was made on a shoestring budget of $300,000, largely funded by campaigning left-wing organisations, and began life as a so-called "guerrilla" DVD which was sold online. One of the organisations, Moveon.org, screened the film at around 3,500 "house parties" across the nation. It quickly topped Amazon.com's bestsellers' list. In the past few weeks it won theatrical release in a handful of US cities and it could now be picked up nationwide.
Outfoxed is one of a new breed of documentaries enjoying unprecedented success in American cinemas. The most successful of the lot, Fahrenheit 9/11, Moore's biting but meandering assault on the Bush administration, has made more than $100 million at the US box office alone.
Others include Control Room, a portrait of the Arabic TV network al-Jazeera; The Corporation, an examination of corporate America; Super Size Me, a wry take on the ill-effects of MacCulture, and Hunting the President, a trot through the hounding of former president Bill Clinton.
The phenomenon could simply be a hunger for polemic in politically charged times. Outfoxed, while ridiculing the bias of Fox News, certainly makes no pretence at fair play itself, giving the channel no right of reply and indulging in some suspect editing to make its points.
The success of the films, though, could also be explained by a different sentiment - a growing sense that Americans have been failed by the mainstream media, particularly since the Iraq war, and have an urge to seek out information elsewhere. It is probably no coincidence that in each case the underlying villain is the mainstream American media. Outfoxed is just the most stunning and unapologetic exemplar.
It also seems unlikely to be a coincidence that the tub-thumping documentary is succeeding at a time when the nation's most well-respected newspapers and some of the best-known TV anchors are admitting that they failed to ask the tough questions in the run-up to war in Iraq.
The mainstream media's self-doubt was most recently evident in the Washington Post, which on August 12th ran a critical self-examination of its coverage in the months leading into the war and beyond. Stories questioning the rationale for war were buried at the back of the paper, while government proclamations regularly found their place on the front page. The piece concluded that, with hindsight, coverage had "looked strikingly one-sided at times".
In May the New York Times delivered an even harsher assessment of its own performance. Some stories, the newspaper ombudsman Daniel Okrent said, "pushed Pentagon assertions so aggressively you could almost sense epaulets on the shoulders of editors".
The Post article ended with a question: "Whether a tougher approach by the Post and other news organisations would have slowed the rush to war is, at best, a matter of conjecture." The comment drew angry responses from readers. "Clearly, this is untrue," wrote one. "If we believe that a properly informed citizenry is integral to a functional democracy, we should either recognise the media's role in allowing the war to happen or accept that we don't have a functioning democracy." And Christiane Amanpour of CNN at the end of last year aired her belief that the press had been "muzzled" by the government.
The sense that Americans have lost some trust in mainstream US media is borne out elsewhere. Americans dubious of the cheerleading at home have been scrambling for overseas news coverage ever since the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Almost 45 per cent of the 9.6 million users accessing the website of the Guardian newspaper originate in the US.
Conspiracy theories have abounded not just about the administration but also about the media's complicity. Control Room touches on the well-rehearsed theory that the Pentagon press office staged the iconic toppling of the statue of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad.
The thirst for "truth" also seems evident in the sheer volume of books clogging the bestsellers' lists that promise to reveal the facts about the decisions that led to the Iraq war and the Bush administration. They have included the former intelligence chief Richard Clarke's Against All Enemies and Ron Suskind's The Price of Loyalty, based on the recollections of the former treasury chief Paul O'Neill.
Of concern to journalists is that an unchecked mass of information, often with a clear agenda, is being embraced as fact. During the recent preview of autumn programming on ABC, the TV news anchor George Stephanopoulos expressed some concern at the growth of films such as Fahrenheit 9/11 and the reasons for their popularity.
He said he had seen the film with a group of undecided voters. "What was most striking to me is when I asked them: 'Why did you go to see it?' and they said: 'Because we wanted to get the facts'," he told reporters. "At least a few of them had the sense that if it's coming from the government, if it's coming from the established media, they must not be telling us something, and we have to go to this alternative venue to get the facts."
Even Hollywood directors are taking note. A recent article in the Los Angeles Times pointed to the re-emergence of politically charged films including The Manchurian Candidate, in which a vice-presidential candidate is in the sway of a Halliburton-style corporation. "The free press hasn't been on the job," the director Jonathan Demme told the paper. "Maybe people are turning to all these films and documentaries for information, as if they're an unconscious effort to fill a void."
The grasp for information could, though, simply be another example of the yawning chasm that divides America: the culture wars between the metropolitan values of the coasts and the conservative values of the vast swathes in between, a clash more in evidence now than ever before.
Most of the bestselling books are anti-Bush and most of the documentaries now packing them in at the cinemas notably appeal to liberal sensibilities. Al Franken's recent book Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them attempts to explode the myth of liberal control of the media. The appetite for left-wing treatises on page or screen suggests he is right.
While half of America is looking elsewhere for information, the other half is quietly content. Fox News - because of and not in spite of the flaws exposed in Outfoxed - remains the most popular news channel in the US. - (Guardian Service)