watched Outfoxed

As I mentioned in a recent post, I will be watching a few documentaries to gain some insight into documentary film. Today I watched Outfoxed (Robert Greenwald, 2004) The documentary exposes the right wing bias of Rupert Murdoch’s FOX NEWS channel, disproves the FOX NEWS slogan of ‘Fair and Balanced’ and looks at the techniques that Rupert Murdoch's republican news channel use for their manipulative journalism. I could write pages detailing the content of the documentary, however I find it more useful to analyze how this fine documentary was created and the techniques that are applicable with both my project on fulfilment and big budget documentaries

My first observation was that the director featured a range of interviews with credible subjects, former FOX NEWS reporters, producers and others with previous experience in FOX. The director, Robert Greenwald had obviously devoted a significant portion of his resources to conducting interviews, there were numerous segments from these interviews and for the most part these ‘talking heads’ were very informative. Because the Outfoxed team interviewed so many subjects, only the most interesting and informative parts of each interview were included. This is a key learning point for anyone planning on making a documentary like myself, always gather a large amount of interview footage, so in post production you can choose to include the most interesting parts of each interview.

I also observed that the documentary supported the messages of its interviews by providing examples. For example, after an interview segment about FOX NEWS reporters saying “some people say” when their comments are unsupported, the director Robert Greenwald provides us with a number of FOX NEWS segments where we can clearly see this technique being demonstrated. Using credible evidence to support a point of view allows a documentary like Outfoxed to be transformed from a collection of theories, into a strong argument that challenges the audience’s beliefs. Although my documentary is more about exploring a topic than changing beliefs, it’s still invaluable to recognise how much stronger documentary film is when claims are supported or illustrated in some way.