Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s War on Journalism
Whatever the reasons, the annual profits from DVDs outstripped those of the box office a few years ago. In both businesses most of the money comes from a few blockbuster titles. But there’s something new going on when a supposedly marginal polemic like Outfoxed can catapult itself into the big time, challenging entrenched media powers in the process.
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While largely effective, Greenwald’s documentary is not a complete success. Its biggest limitation is its insistence that Fox News is an offense against liberals and the Democratic Party rather than against people in general. It also intermittently taints its analysis with the same kind of primitive insults used by Fox. We are told, for example, that conservative commentator Sean Hannity is “a good-looking, all-American, clean-cut kind of guy,” that Alan Colmes, his liberal foil, “is a little squirrelly looking,” and that the contrast “sends a subtle message.” What is this subtle message? That the not-so-subtle public, including you and me, won’t give political credence to some anchors because of the way they look? Thanks for the vote of confidence, guys.
O’Reilly: “As respect–as respect–in respect for your father, who was a Port Authority worker, a fine American, who got killed unnecessarily by barbarians–”
Glick: “…the people of the ruling class, the small minority.”
Before I watched Greenwald’s 77-minute documentary, I had to sit through a trailer for his previous opus, Uncovered: The Whole Truth About the Iraq War (2003). Or so it seemed at the time–I’d momentarily forgotten I had only to hit “menu” on my remote to skip past this imposition, an option unavailable in theaters and less automatic on a VCR. It’s not that I mind trailers, but it’s nice to have some choice in the matter.
Much as videos conform to different and incompatible regional formats (NTSC in the U.S. and Japan, PAL in most of Europe, SECAM in France), DVDs are stamped with one of six different regional codes. In the case of video, these barriers are an accidental legacy of varying technical standards adopted by individual nations when television was new. The subdivision of the DVD market happened by design: regional codes were created by the movie industry to protect its copyrights and profits. They’re meant, for example, to prevent DVDs of a given blockbuster released in region one (the U.S.) from reaching region six (China) before the film has completed its theatrical run in the latter market. But the codes are becoming irrelevant, given the increasing availability of multiregional DVD players, which can be had for as little as $60. (Reportedly there are also ways to “hack” some single-region players into multiregional ones, but you’ll have to look elsewhere for advice on how to do that.)
