Fixed on Fox

In a season of politically confrontational movies, documentary filmmaker Robert Greenwald is aiming to do to the Fox News Channel what Michael Moore is trying to do to the Bush administration with his “Fahrenheit 9/11.”

A coalition of liberal-minded groups teamed to fund “Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s War on Journalism,” Greenwald’s new film that portrays the cable news and opinion channel as the prime example of what’s wrong with media consolidation.

Working in stealth for six months, Greenwald pieced together allegations from former Fox insiders, memos from the network’s editorial chief and extensive on-air clips taken from four months of taping the channel to lay out how Fox, in his view, aggressively promotes a Republican agenda.

His arsenal includes:

• A 2000 tape in which Fox News Channel’s chief political correspondent, Carl Cameron, chats amiably with then-presidential candidate George W. Bush — just before interviewing him — about how much Cameron’s wife is enjoying campaigning for the president-to-be.

“My wife has been hanging out with your sister… ,” Cameron tells Bush. “She’s a good soul. She’s a really good soul,” Bush responds.

• Nine recent memos from John Moody, Fox’s editorial chief, tersely laying out the way in which Fox’s reporters and anchors are to discuss the day’s news, including pro-administration developments they are to highlight, such as the economy’s job growth.

• Former West Coast anchor Jon Du Pre talking about how reporters were praised when they took shots at Democrats and encouraged to report negatively on Jesse Jackson. The anchor also said he got in trouble because his coverage of a Ronald Reagan birthday celebration wasn’t sufficiently enthusiastic.

• Fox clips juxtaposed with Republican talking points to show how news anchors and opinion commentators pound home a theme throughout a day, such as a sustained attack on former White House terror chief Richard A. Clarke, and a humorous portrayal of presumptive Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry as “French.”

• After top-rated Fox host Bill O’Reilly claims he only once has told a guest to “shut up,” O’Reilly is seen in clips using the phrase over and over. More seriously, the movie explores O’Reilly’s on-air feud with the son of a man killed in the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on New York’s World Trade Center.

“Outfoxed,” which so far is slated for limited screenings and a DVD release, joins a spate of summer documentaries attacking the media. Among them are Moore’s “Fahrenheit 9/11,” which contends that TV news has been too supportive of the Bush administration’s foreign policies, and “The Hunting of the President,” which criticizes newspaper coverage of the Whitewater accusations that dogged President Clinton’s White House.

Greenwald says his goal is that “everybody in America turns off Fox News, that they look at it and see it for what it is and then turn it off.”

Almost from the minute Fox News Channel went on the air in 1996, critics have complained that the channel, the brainchild of News Corp. chairman Murdoch, distorts the news and promotes a conservative agenda. Fox, whose use of the motto “Fair and Balanced” is particularly irritating to critics, counters that it merely gives equal time to voices that it contends have a hard time getting heard on media outlets it considers liberal-biased.

Indeed, copies of the Moody memos appear to bend over backward to favor a Republican line, but they also show instances where Moody ordered the staff to play down, for example, criticism of Democratic candidate Kerry and to give Kerry and Bush equal time on days when both were delivering big speeches.

Greenwald originally wanted to look at the effects of media consolidation but soon decided to focus on Fox, he said.

Eventually, he contacted more than 50 current and former Fox employees.

He found plenty of people who had tough things to say about their former employer, such as Clara Frenk, a Fox booker and producer in 1998-99 who talked about an anti-liberal bias, and former terrorism commentator Larry Johnson, who said he was dropped from Fox in January 2003, without explanation, after he made comments critical of the Bush administration.

But Greenwald didn’t find what Fox critics have always hoped for: some kind of internal memo or a whistle blower who would prove their case of bias unequivocally.

“There is no ‘Watergate tape,’ ” he said, adding that Fox News executives are “very smart people; they don’t give you the smoking gun.”

What he found instead, he said, is “patterns. You’re not going to find one memo or one person. You look at a pattern.”