On February 10th, the Iraq Film Festival wrapped up with a screening of Robert Greenwald’s “Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s War on Journalism.” Greenwald claims that the Fox News Channel has a rampant conservative bias. First, his film purports to identify the existence of this disease, and thereafter it proposes a cure: political suppression of Fox News. Whether you are liberal or conservative, if you think free speech is vital to democracy, you won’t like Greenwald’s film or his goals.

Greenwald presents his argument through interviews in which numerous liberal media “experts” (including Jeff Cohen, David Brock, Frank O’Donnell, Richard Clark, and Al Franken) denounce Fox’s cold-hearted conservative bias, and through short clips of Fox News Channel programs strung together in rapid succession. (The average length of one of Greenwald’s Fox News clips is probably less than one second). Many aspects of the production exhibit questionable logic, to put it mildly. For example, do we really need to hear 20 clips of Bill O’Reilly saying “shut up” to convey the point that he puts on a confrontational opinion show?

More importantly, how is this relevant to an inquiry into bias in Fox’s news reporting? Talk and opinion shows are just that; they are not the news. Greenwald also gives us voice interviews with three anonymous former Fox employees who “expose what it’s like to work for Fox News.” One of these employees bemoans the fact that if “you don’t go along with the mindset of the hierarchy” and “challenge them on their attitudes about things,” you’ll be fired.

Again, how is this relevant to this supposed expose of Fox’s news bias? Wouldn’t it be easy to find CNN employees making the same complaint? Don’t you think employees at practically any large organization in the world make comments like those? Next the film displays several private Fox memos sending management orders to employees about the main stories to be covered on a particular day, as if prioritization of potential stories is, by itself, evidence of bias. Why doesn’t Greenwald show us the more important news stories of those days that Fox “passed up” to run its conservative choices? Wouldn’t that be a logical way to prove bias?

The most alarming content in this film isn’t its insistence that Fox News intentionally injects a hidden conservative bias into news reports -- a claim which the film makes repeatedly, but oddly, fails to support with evidence. Nor is it alarming that the film fails to acknowledge that practically all other TV news channels comprising the mainstream media have been criticized for the opposite bias.

But most disturbing was Greenwald’s proposed solution to the “problem” of Fox News. Greenwald’s horde of experts implores viewers to take action against conservative media bias. Specifically, they want concerned citizens to join the political warpath with media activist groups, demanding FCC hearings and anti-trust laws which would set limits on “media consolidation.”

Greenwald is worried that News Corp (the company which owns Fox Network) and a few other “media empires” have become so big and powerful that they no longer heed public interest. Instead, he posits that they function in an environment devoid of competition, where fledgling local news sources have no chance of survival. Greenwald doesn’t seem to recognize competition when he sees it, or even when he films it. Consumers of news have more choices than ever these days. Fox News has been chosen by millions of consumers who apparently disliked the news slant coming from the major networks and CNN.

That is called competition

Also, apparently Greenwald hasn’t been told about the recent “blogosphere revolution,” the newfound popularity of hundreds of internet blogs representing a wide array of viewpoints which are set up and maintained at practically no cost to the creator. Many of these political commentary web pages get hundreds of thousands of “hits” a day, and analysts agree that they have already had a profound effect on American media dissemination. If a news station tries to get away with sloppily researched or questionable facts (as CBS’ Dan Rather so painfully discovered), they will have to answer to the ever-vigilant bloggers. While we’re on the topic of informing Mr. Greenwald, somebody should also send him a copy of Thomas Sowell’s Basic Economics.

On the film website, http://www.outfoxed.org, Greenwald laments that giant media conglomerations are no longer accountable to the people they are supposed to serve but instead work simply for their own economic benefit. He believes that there exists an inevitable conflict of interest between providing public service and running a business most profitably. Apparently he makes no connection between a business serving its own economic benefit and pleasing its customers, also known as “the public.”

His hope is that “Outfoxed” will expose the truth of big media (Fox News, anyway) to the American public (presumably too ignorant or apathetic to realize this before Greenwald came along), who will then be inspired to run to their congressmen begging for reform by placing government restrictions on the free media market! Ironically, Greenwald’s preferred method of presenting a “widespread and diverse” range of views to the American public is to break up businesses like Fox News, whose “diverse” presentation of the news he doesn’t like.

When the government starts telling us who we can and cannot receive information from, it sounds eerily like the end of democracy to me.