On the 22nd September we saw SBS’s Dateline program which had a report on the documentary Outfoxed about Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News in America.
Intruiged by the reports of blatant bias and propoganda on behalf of the US Republican Party (its President is Roger Ailes, who was a media strategist for Nixon and also worked for Regan and Bush Snr) I ordered a copy of Outfoxed from Amazon, which turned up on Friday.
Donna and I watched it and it’s both illuminating and truely scarey. Fox News is ruled by memos from the top giving direction to its staff about what is and what isn’t news, there are the constant reinforcement about who to vote for with repeated mentions of “Only X days to Bush’s relection” and the indiscriminate mixing of reporting and comment.
It seems that the more you watch Fox News the less able you are to correctly answer questions on the Iraq war (questions of fact rather than opinion), according to a survey carried out by PIPA (available for reading as a PDF file or as a web page from Google’s cache).
So relying on Fox News makes you dumber..
Doesn’t make me feel too good about the upcoming US elections given that Fox News is apparently the most watched news channel. 🙁