Left Wing

Of Foxes and Guerrillas

Robert Greenwald employs "a 'guerrilla' method of documentary filmmaking, creating timely political films on short schedules and small budgets and then promoting and selling them ... through partnerships with grass-roots political organizations like MoveOn.org." His latest, "Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism," includes "interviews with former Fox employees, leaked policy memos ...

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Fact-checking Michael Moore

Michael Moore's previous films have generated a cottage industry of conservative commentators eager to find examples of sloppiness and exaggeration, but as New York Times reporter Philip Shenon observes, "if 'Fahrenheit 9/11' attracts the audience Mr. Moore and his distributors are predicting, Mr. Moore may face an onslaught of fact-checking unlike anything he - or any other documentary filmmaker - has ever experienced.

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"Stop Michael Moore" Campaign a GOP Front

"So desperate are Bush Republicans to kill Michael Moore's latest
film, Fahrenheit 9/11, they have hired a public relations firm to
set up a web site attacking Moore," the Alternative Press Review writes. "The site,
MoveAmericaForward.com, claims to be 'non-partisan,' but a glance
at the 'About' page of the site reveals the director and staff of
Move America Forward are all diehard Republicans, anti-tax

No

The O'Franken Factor

"Despite ongoing financial woes, Air America Radio appears to have garnered a significant audience during its first month on the air, particularly among the younger listeners sought by advertisers," reports John Cook. "An analysis of recently released figures from Arbitron, the radio ratings service, showed that in New York Air America beat Rush Limbaugh's station among 25-to-54-year-olds during the period that Limbaugh and Al Franken, the host of the flagship show 'The O'Franken Factor,' go head-to-head.

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Real Atrocities and Faked Photos

The photos of Iraqi prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib are bad enough, considering that possibly 25 prisoners have died while in American custody. However, some faked photos are also circulating, including pictures of an alleged rape by soldiers that were actually taken from a porno site. Independent journalist Chris Albritton debunks the fakes and criticizes a cavalier attitude toward the truth that "seems to have taken hold in anti-war journalism as well.

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Brock's Back

Former right-wing attack journalist David Brock blasted the conservative movement in his 2002 confessional, Blinded by the Right. Now he has launched Media Matters, a "Web-based, not-for-profit progressive research and information center dedicated to comprehensively monitoring, analyzing, and correcting conservative misinformation in the U.S.

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Bush and Hitler

The Republican National Committee is complaining about advertisements comparing George W. Bush to Adolf Hitler that were posted briefly on on MoveOn.org's "Bush in 30 Seconds" web site, which invites people to submit their own creative TV spots criticizing the Bush administration's performance. MoveOn has responded that the ads were submissions to their contest and that it is "deliberately and maliciously misleading" to accuse MoveOn of "sponsoring" them.

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New Liberal Radio Network Picks Celebrity PR Man

"Dan Klores Communications is helping to introduce Progress Media's plans for a liberal radio network to an intensely interested, but highly skeptical press," PR Week reports. The agency has been helping shape Progress Media's communications strategy. "The network has been billed as a way of balancing the strong influence of conservative talk radio, but so far media reporters have been wondering aloud why this would be different than other less-than-successful attempts at left-of-center radio programming, such as journalist Jim Hightower's show," PR Week writes.

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