Recent viewings

Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism. Documentarian Robert Greenwald puts paid to the notion that Fox New's "Fair and Balanced" slogan is anything but conscious deception. Copies of internal memos dictating the political "talking points" of the day, video footage collected from Fox's broadcasts by a team of volunteer monitors, and interviews with Fox reporters exhaustively document what can only be called a pervasive system of centrally-directed thought control. In some of Greenwald's most effective moments, he highlights the degree to which Fox News, like Orwell's Ministry of Truth, blatantly alters the facts, even contradicting or denying its own past statements, to fit whatever the propaganda need of the day happens to be. In one horribly funny segment, Bill O'Reilly piously claims that he has only told one person on his show to "shut up". A montage of several minutes, in which a sneering, nostril-flaring O'Reilly bellows "SHUT UP! SHUT UP!!!" at a succession of interviewees who have failed to toe the party line of the day, follows.

Of course, people who watch Fox will never see this information, and if it is pointed out to them they will automatically dismiss it as "liberal propaganda", because that's what their "fair and balanced" news source tells them. No doubt they will also believe, after the 2008 election, that executive privilege has always been a fraudulent claim used by evil Democratic incumbents to cover up Presidential wrongdoing; that executive privilege is a vital privacy protection that keeps former Republican presidents from being unfairly persecuted by evil Democratic politicians; that presidential pardons issued by Bill Clinton are an underhanded trick to keep his criminal cronies from being justly prosecuted by brave Republican statesmen; that presidential pardons issued by George W. Bush are noble efforts to keep brave patriots from being persecuted by evil Democratic politicians; that the war in Iraq is the fault of the Democratic incumbent president; and that the Republican party has always been against excessive government spending.