Media, Culture and Society in The Outfoxed - Essay Example

The end result is a documentary attacking the conservative Fox News Network, and it comes across reflecting badly not so much on Rupert Murdoch, as it does the former Fox News employees. The director’s effort to expose media magnate Rupert Murdoch as a dangerous conservative right-wing, Christian fanatic; instead quickly becomes an airing of disgruntled former employee views, whose own philosophies and ideas were in stark contrast to the conservative environment within which they worked.

Even though for years, decades, in fact, the American liberal party, the Democrats, have ruled the American press corps, no greater threat to that sector has emerged and caused American liberals or the American Democratic party to speak out as loudly, or, in some cases, fanatically, as the Fox News Network. Never mind that CNN, under the management and direction of liberal Ted Turner, is the liberal opposite of FNN, and resorts to the same tactics and extreme leanings as cited by the former Fox employees as being misleading of the public opinion; that FNN has been attacked by liberals in a way that CNN never has been.

At one point in the Outfoxed documentary, Bob McChesney compares Fox to organized crime, using the gangster film The Godfather, to give documentary viewers the sense of the point he’s trying to make about Rupert Murdoch’s media empire is a subversive or covert organization, instead of a mainstream news organization that serves a widespread public opinion and market.The problem with the Outfoxed documentary is that it fails to bring to light any area of real concern in Murdoch’s media organization.

The former employees, while journalistic successes in their own right, such as McChesney, Jeff Cohen, James Wolcott, and Clara Frenk; come across as whining disgruntled liberals who fail to expose shed light on anything going on, or that went on, at FNN except that the conservative view promoted by the Murdoch organization was not their view. Jeff Cohen warns that “media is the nervous system of a democracy,” and says he’s concerned that FNN is committing consumer fraud with its slogan “Fair and Balanced.

” The documentary then flashes over to the Independent party Representative Bernie Sanders, who comments on the dangers of the right-wing conservative party. A feeble attempt employed by the filmmaker to avoid either a Republican or Democrat opinion, and to, himself, portray his own liberal leanings as “fair and balanced.” Former FNN employee Clara Frenk admits that she was warned off working at FNN because of its staunch conservative environment, but her need to be employed weighed out.

She complains that the list of liberals featured in the FNN line-up to confront, or “balance,” the conservative philosophy, consisted of people she was, not herself familiar with, people not well known in Washington, DC. Thus, she alludes, that these liberals were less qualified to represent the liberal ideology; even though people such as Al Franken and the liberal media pundit pet actor Janine Garafalo, and an extensive list of other well-known liberals have been featured on FNN.

What is the real problem here? Winston Churchill once said - or at least it has been attributed to Churchill - “A man in his twenties who is not a liberal is a man without a heart. A man in his forties who is not a conservative is a man without a brain.” America has aged, entered its majority population’s silver/gray years; and with that aging, if not wisdom, has come conservatism.