Anti-Fox film said to lack balance

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A new documentary produced by a fan of Michael Moore and financed by some left-leaning groups who dislike President Bush tries to make the point that Fox News Channel is not only conservative, it's blatant propaganda.

Director Robert Greenwald's film "Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism" uses memos from Fox executives, Fox clips and unaired footage, and accusations from former Fox employees to ridicule the network's "fair and balanced" slogan.

"Fox became a propaganda outlet, in my judgment, for the [Bush] administration's drive to war," Larry Johnson, a former State Department and CIA employee who was a Fox News commentator and security consultant from 2002 to 2003, says in an interview in "Outfoxed."

"I can't believe anyone can pawn themselves off as a credible news organization when this is really nothing but a propaganda machine for the right wing," said Jon Du Pre, who was a Fox News anchor on the West Coast from 1999 to 2002.

The movie debuts today at the New School University in New York, and the digital video disc will be available on the Internet today also.

Rich Noyes, research director for the Media Research Center, accused those responsible for "Outfoxed" of apparently "taking some quotes out of context" and of stringing together information "to make a partisan point," rather than fact-finding.

"Outfoxed" cost $300,000 to produce and was funded by partisan political organizations that favor Democrats, such as MoveOn.org and the Center for American Progress, a policy group founded by John Podesta, who was President Clinton's chief of staff.

Mr. Greenwald made "Outfoxed" without contacting Fox News and could be sued for copyright infringement.

"A lot of groups are springing forward in this election year to try to stifle the conservative point of view," said Mr. Noyes, citing MoveOn.org and the Center for American Progress.

Mr. Noyes said of Fox News: "The commentary tends to move toward the right. But the news coverage is fair and balanced."

Tom Rosenthiel, head of the Project for Excellence in Journalism, would say of Fox's coverage only that "it's very difficult to generalize about the content of a whole network."

Paul Schur, a Fox News spokesman, said yesterday the network would not comment on the film and referred reporters to comments from John Moody, the network's senior vice president for news, in an interview with Howard Kurtz that ran in The Washington Post on Saturday.

The film cites a memo on Iraq coverage Mr. Moody wrote Fox personnel in April that said: "Do not fall into the easy trap of mourning the loss of U.S. lives and asking out loud why we are there."

Mr. Moody told Mr. Kurtz that the memo just meant that "casualties are part of war" and should not be described as relevant to "the political question we debate all the time -- should we be there?"

In his column, Mr. Kurtz said Mr. Greenwald "makes no effort at fairness or balance himself." He criticized the failure to contact Fox and said the filmmaker "indulged in some misleading editing," for example implying that Fox reporters were saying things in their own voice when they were quoting Republicans.