Flutterby™! : Outfoxed

Went over to Jeanne's to see Outfoxed last night, and frankly I was disappointed. The problem with all of these docuganda films is that they're preaching to the choir; seeing clip after clip of Bill O'Reilly lying and contradicting himself isn't going to convince his fans, because they've been seeing him do it for years now and still believe; in the minds of many charisma is worth more than observable reality.

And, really, the FOX News strategy is brilliant: The purpose of media is to deliver eyeballs to advertisers, and a demographic that doesn't think critically and accepts style over substance (and takes fat white guys in suits as its symbol of trust) is exactly the sort of eyeballs that advertisers want.

Pretending that motivating the masses to march on the FCC to change media ownership laws will change anything is naive at best; I'm subscribed to the American Family Association action alerts mailing list and I see what they're up to, and fighting out speech and truth issues in the legislative forum is the wrong place to do it.

Besides which, flashing up the usual huge long list of URLs at the end of the piece simply reinforces what's happening now: People who might care see that these organizations are doing something, and figure that that's enough.

If we're going to change attitudes and enlighten the populace it has to be a distributed effort, and it has to be reaching out to people who have other opinions. This is why I believe that weblogs are crucial, with the recent amateur coverage of the DNC they're illuminating the reality that mainstream news doesn't bring anything enlightened to the discussion, especially not when it's an event carefully composed of planned presentations, but more importantly they're causing a distributed body of people to start to look deeper at their references and sources, and to think critically.

Anyway, unless you're someone who thinks that FOX News is a legitimate news source (and you're probably not reading this if you do), I think you can give Outfoxed a miss.