The climax of the Republican National Convention three weeks ago thrust this man into every home and every hotel room in the United States.

GEORGE W. BUSH, US PRESIDENT: I’m honoured by your support and I accept your nomination for President of the United States.

It did so in a way that made broadcasting history. For the first time, the most-watched station in the US on that night wasn’t CBS or NBC or ABC or even the long-established Cable News Network. It was the upstart, Fox News, about to turn only two presidential elections old.

FOX NEWS COMMENTATOR: That’s here, on the Fox News Channel, the network America trusts for fair and balanced news.

The Fox News slogan is ’Fair & Balanced’, but its coverage is unashamedly pro-President Bush.

FOX NEWS COMMENTATOR: The President has the direction and the vision to take us into the future boldly and with courage and with optimism.

Pro-war and, these days, anti-John Kerry.

FOX NEWS COMMENTATOR: Many are angry over Kerry’s post-war protest.

FOX NEWS COMMENTATOR: But the bigger issue here is Kerry’s involvement in a group that is inherently violent.

FOX NEWS COMMENTATOR: Presumptive Democratic nominee John Kerry was scaring old people, as usual.

FOX NEWS COMMENTATOR: Assuming that the unthinkable happens and that Senator Kerry becomes president...

BILL O’REILLY, FOX NEWS COMMENTATOR: And it is our duty as loyal Americans to shut up once the fighting begins. Once the war against Saddam begins, we expect every American to support our military and, if they can’t do that, to shut up.

PROTESTERS CHANT: Shut the Fox up! Shut the Fox up! Shut the Fox up! Shut the Fox up! Shut the Fox up!

Tonight hundreds of New Yorkers have flocked to the network’s door, in an attempt to shut it up.

MAN: ..they’re working for the Bush Administration. The bias they have is just like so severe.

MAN 2: I believe Fox News is proud to give people a false view of the world.

And they’re not the only ones concerned. The next day these people are queuing to get into an explosive new movie that takes Fox apart. ’OutFoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s War on Journalism’ is a serious hit. As a DVD, it sold 150,000 copies within weeks.

MAN 3: It was the top seller the first week it came out, actually, the number one DVD on Amazon.

And this is what they’ve come to see.

BOB McCHESNEY, FOUNDER OF FREE PRESS, AUTHOR OF ’THE PROBLEM OF THE MEDIA’: The real revolutionary breakthrough of Fox has been it’s eliminated journalism. I mean, that’s the thing to understand. What Fox News Channel’s done is that it’s stripped out any notion of journalism as we’ve traditionally understood it from its product. There is no journalism at the Fox News Channel.

BILL O’REILLY: Quiet! Listen... Cut his mic. Stop. Stop. Stop. Stop.

INTERVIEWEE: Let me finish. Let me...

BILL O’REILLY: Chad!

FOX NEWS COMMENTATOR: Thank you, Jamie.

INTERVIEWEE: I’m doing...

FOX NEWS COMMENTATOR: Thank you, Jamie. Goodnight. Thank you, Jamie, thank you.

FOX NEWS COMMENTATOR: Go take your cheap little pathetic shot. I’m telling you that that’s...

INTERVIEWEE: You’re taking cheap little pathetic shots.

FOX NEWS COMMENTATOR: Just giving you his record.

INTERVIEWEE: I’m trying to tell you what the truth is.

FOX NEWS COMMENTATOR: John Kerry is Jane Fonda with the Burberry scarf tied around his neck.

JON DU PRE, FORMER FOX NEWS ANCHOR, WEST COAST BUREAU: Any ad lib that made the Democrats look stupid and made the Republicans look smart would get an ’Attaboy!’ a sort of pat on the back, a wink or a nod.

BILL O’REILLY, FOX NEWS COMMENTATOR: Jimmy Carter is making yet another mistake and, this time...

The ’OutFoxed’ producers quickly formed the view that Fox had fundamentally undermined the essence of news by blurring it with comment.

ROBERT GREENWALD, EXECUTIVE PRODUCER, ’OUTFOXED’: It’s almost impossible to separate when they’re doing commentary and when they’re doing news - by design. When you read a newspaper, you turn to the editorial page, there are the editorials, it’s very clear. It’s not that way with Fox News. They mix it up all the time. Look, I studied this for months and months and I couldn’t know, which shows... I mean, wait a minute - is that a news show? Is that a commentary show? What are they doing? And the people who were working for me said - ’cause they said, "Let’s focus on the news show" - I said, "We can’t tell the difference." And that’s when I realised that we were on to something right away. I mean, literally, we’re sitting down and we’re studying it and we can’t tell the difference.

Former Fox News journalist Clara Frenk says she was frequently directed as to what to write.

CLARA FRENK, FORMER FOX NEWS PRODUCER: First of all, I have never worked in a newsroom before or since, where not only do you get your assignment at the beginning of the day as to what the stories will be - which happens in every newsroom all over the world - but where you are told before you do an ounce of reporting or even make one phone call what the outcome of the story will be, that the story will be covered in a certain way and will reach a certain conclusion. That was the first difference, and that’s certainly evident in the memos that you see in ’OutFoxed’.

COPY OF INTERNAL FOX MEMO: "The so-called 9/11 commission has already been meeting...This is not "what did he know and when did he know it" stuff. Don’t turn this into Watergate."

These damaging internal Fox News memos, made public for the first time in ’OutFoxed’, confirm Clara Frenk’s allegations. They reveal a network that dictates the slant that reporters and commentators will take day by day. They were a goldmine for the movie’s executive producer, Robert Greenwald.

ROBERT GREENWALD: The Fox News memos that I have in the movie came from a source, a totally credible source, where there was no question.

COPY OF INTERNAL FOX MEMO: "Let’s refer to the US marines we see in the foreground as ’sharpshooters’ not snipers, which carries a negative connotation."

ROBERT GREENWALD: They arrived in the mail, having been sent in a circuitous fashion so they could not be traced. And I was surprised that they had put as much as they had put on paper because...

Delighted, I guess?

ROBERT GREENWALD: Well, yes, I mean delighted from a film-maker’s point of view, distraught from a citizen’s point of view, um, because I never thought there would be one smoking gun.

COPY OF INTERNAL FOX MEMO DATE: "Kerry, starting to feel the heat for his flip-flop voting record, is in West Virginia."

This memo set up weeks of coverage about flip-flopping.

FOX NEWS COMMENTATOR: ..defining Kerry as a flip-flopper.

FOX NEWS COMMENTATOR: And you’re saying he flip-flopped on the issue of this?

FOX NEWS COMMENTATOR: He does seem to agonise and flip-flop over and over and over again.

FOX NEWS COMMENTATOR: You’re talking flip-flops.

FOX NEWS COMMENTATOR: A new brand of summer footwear - John Kerry flip-flops.

FOX NEWS COMMENTATOR: They say that he flip-flops a lot.

FOX NEWS COMMENTATOR: He’s flip-flopped now on every major issue.

FOX NEWS COMMENTATOR: Would those be the flip-flops?

FOX NEWS COMMENTATOR: ’Cause he’s flip-flopped on everything else.

FOX NEWS COMMENTATOR: You’ve seen him flip-flop on a whole variety of issues.

FOX NEWS COMMENTATOR: An opportunistic flip-flopper who doesn’t have any principles - is that a little harsh?

FOX NEWS COMMENTATOR: I think, um, it shows one thing - the weakness of John Kerry.

FOX NEWS COMMENTATOR: You’re watching Fox News - real journalism, fair and balanced.

And positive messages were coordinated as well...

FOX NEWS COMMENTATOR: The Baghdad Equestrian Club is open for business.

..and nowhere more bizarrely so than in news about Iraq.

FOX NEWS COMMENTATOR: It’s the Iraq you don’t hear about - falling unemployment, rising wages, interest rates down, foreign investment up.

FOX NEWS COMMENTATOR: Life for 95% of the Iraqis is already immeasurably better than it was under the decades of Saddam’s rule. There’s no question about that and that’s what the least reported story is over there. You go to the markets, they’re thriving. Big, fat fish coming out of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers.

FOX NEWS COMMENTATOR: Young men in Baghdad blowing off steam with their cars. The guys gathered to put their wheels through their paces once a week.

In the movie, former Fox News freelance writer Dave Korb explains the way in which his senior producer directed that coverage.

DAVE KORB, FORMER FOX NEWS FREELANCE WRITER: She told us, "Now, just keep in mind, it’s all good. "This is such a fair and balanced issue...Keep it positive... We’ve got to emphasise all the good that were doing." She, at that point, made a reference to rebuilding schools, bringing democracy to Iraq, and then she said, "See? Big progress. Yoo hoo for us." Things were actually, at that point, going quite badly.

FOX NEWS COMMENTATOR: 277 US soldiers have now died in Iraq, which means that, statistically speaking, US soldiers have less of a chance of dying from all causes in Iraq than citizens have of being murdered in California, which is roughly the same geographical size.

TIM GRAHAM, ANALYST, MEDIA RESEARCH CENTER, WASHINGTON: I’m guessing it must have probably really started to take hold during ’98, with Monica Lewinsky. I mean cable news in general really enjoyed that story.

US conservatives see no problem with the direction of the Fox coverage. In fact, they welcome it. They say it’s redressing an imbalance. Tim Graham is an analyst at the Washington-based Media Research Center.

TIM GRAHAM: We want something different. We want ’Fair and Balanced’ - that’s where the motto finds its place among the American people. We want difference. We want some network that doesn’t treat the Republicans like they have two horns and a tail.

The film’s executive producer, Robert Greenwald, is warmly received whenever he speaks at special screenings.

ROBERT GREENWALD: The film, the Fox film, has really been an amazing and unexpected experience for all of us.

He still can’t quite believe the impact the film has had.

ROBERT GREENWALD: I mean, there was no way when we started this, or I started and my partners, that we thought that this level of attention from the media, from the public, I mean, frankly, it’s off the charts. What we hoped to do, what I hoped to do was make the film, get it out and start a little bit of a dialogue.

ROBERT GREENWALD (IN OFFICE): The plan at the moment is to have the movie finished by July 6.

WOMAN ON TELEPHONE: Bush’s birthday, I think that’s very appropriate.

ROBERT GREENWALD: Is it really?

WOMAN ON TELEPHONE: Yes, it is.

Greenwald and his team worked in secret for six months.

ROBERT GREENWALD: Because if I didn’t, Fox News would have sued to stop me. So for months we worked in absolute quiet, didn’t let anybody know about it and compiled the footage, compiled the interviews. Also, if Fox News had known what we were doing, they would have tried to even harder silence any of the former employees who spoke to me, to say nothing of the current employees who’ve gotten me very helpful material.

FORMER FOX NEWS EMPLOYEE (ON TELEPHONE): I was a Fox employee for three years. I worked in the news.

MAN: On air or behind the camera?

FORMER FOX NEWS EMPLOYEE: I think I’d rather keep myself anonymous. You’ll disguise my voice, right?

JEFF COHEN, FORMER FOX NEWS CONTRIBUTOR: Media is the nervous system of a democracy.

CLARA FRENK: I’d been warned by people.

Even those who spoke on camera were concerned. Two have agreed to be interviewed by us.

CLARA FRENK: I knew that the people who had a vested interest in keeping Fox on the air don’t take kindly to any kind of criticism. You’re either with us or you’re against us, and, if you’re against us, then you’re in trouble and were going to come after you and we’re going to take cheap shots and we’re gonna try to destroy you.

RUPERT MURDOCH, CHAIRMAN, NEWS CORP CEO AND CHAIRMAN: I’d just like to say how delighted I am that we’ve now reached this moment, when we can firmly announce the starting of a Fox News Channel and a much greater effort on the build-up of Fox News in every area.

ROGER AILES, FOX NEWS CEO AND CHAIRMAN, FORMER MEDIA STRATEGIST FOR NIXON, REAGAN AND BUSH SNR PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGNS: We’d like to be premier journalists. We’d like to restore objectivity where we find it lacking and, ah, and...certainly, there could be that interpretation because of my background but I left politics a number of years ago and have run a news organisation for the last two years. So we just expect to do fine, balanced journalism.

JEFF COHEN, FORMER FOX NEWS CONTRIBUTOR: If there’s one news outlet in the world that Murdoch does not have to have day-to-day meddling in, it’s Fox News Channel. I mean, he has hand-picked an individual who didn’t have a background in journalism, Roger Ailes - he’d been a GOP operative, a Republican operative.

CLARA FRENK: He worked for Nixon, he worked for Reagan and he also worked for the first President Bush. He was known primarily for his vitriolic and slash-and-burn campaign techniques, where he would basically eviscerate opponents by accusing them of not only being - having views that were contrary to the person he was working for, but actually painting them almost as enemies of the state.

JEFF COHEN: We understand how political parties fight each other through attack politics and looking for the weak link of their opponent and then just going after it hour after hour, day after day, for months of the campaign, but Fox News is the first - quote - ’mainstream’ TV channel that practised attack politics.

BILL O’REILLY: In a personal story segment tonight we were surprised to find out that an American who lost his father in the World Trade Center attack had signed an anti-war advertisement that accused the USA itself of terrorism.

Jeremy Glick experienced attack politics first-hand, when he appeared with Bill O’Reilly, the network’s most controversial anchor, and questioned the war in Iraq.

BILL OREILLY: I’m sure your beliefs are sincere but what upsets me is I don’t think your father would be approving of this.

JEREMY M. GLICK: Well, actually, my father thought that Bush’s presidency was illegitimate.

BILL O’REILLY: Maybe he did but I don’t think he’d be equating this country as a terrorist nation.

JEREMY M. GLICK: Well, I wasn’t saying it was necessarily like that.

BILL OREILLY: Yes, you were. I hope your mother is not watching this.

JEREMY M. GLICK: OK. OK.

BILL O’REILLY: In respect for your father...

JEREMY M. GLICK: September 14 - do you want to know what I was doing?

BILL O’REILLY: Shut up. Shut up.

JEREMY M. GLICK: Please don’t tell me to shut up.

BILL OREILLY: In respect for your father, who was a Port Authority worker, a fine American, who got killed unnecessarily by barbarians.

JEREMY M. GLICK: By radical extremists who were trained by this government.

BILL O’REILLY: Respect for him...

JEREMY M. GLICK: Not the people of America, the people, the ruling class, the small minority.

BILL OREILLY: Cut his mic. I’m not going to dress you down anymore. Out of respect for your father. Well be back in a moment with more of The Factor.

JEREMY M. GLICK: We’re done?

BILL OREILLY: We’re done.

JEREMY M. GLICK: You see him gesturing to security guards. And the executive producer and the assistant encouraged me to leave the building because they were - quote - ’concerned’ that if O’Reilly ran into me in the hallway he would end up in jail.

In the 2000 presidential election campaign, Fox’s first full-scale election-night broadcast, the network flexed its muscles. It broadcast a projection that may well have decided the result.

FOX NEWS COMMENTATOR: Fox News now projects George W. Bush the winner in Florida, and thus it appears the winner of the presidency of the United States.

ROBERT GREENWALD: They became the first network to call the election for George Bush, and within minutes, all the other networks jumped in and also called it for George Bush.

TOM BROKAW, NBC: George Bush is the President-elect of the United States.

DAN RATHER, CBS: Bush wins.

PETER JENNINGS, ABC AMERICA: ABC News is now going to project that Florida goes to Mr Bush.

ROBERT GREENWALD: Now, there is no way that the networks had time to analyse the data and call it. And you say, "What’s the big deal?" You know, it turned out that they said later on it wasn’t clear. But what happened was the entire debate about the election became, "Why is Gore trying to take away Bush’s victory?" as opposed to, what it should have been, which is, "This election is too close to call."

Called before a special House inquiry into the election-night projections, Roger Ailes offered an apology.

ROGER AILES: We gave our audience bad information. Our lengthy and critical self-examination shows that we let our viewers down. I apologise for making those bad projections that night. It will not happen again.

But by then, George Bush was President.

JOHN KERRY, US DEMOCRATIC PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: I’m John Kerry and I’m reporting for duty.

Now with the 2004 presidential election just weeks away, Fox has George Bush’s current opponent, John Kerry, in its sights. It’s suggesting that he’s backed by an American enemy.

FOX NEWS COMMENTATOR: John Kerry has Kim Jong-il on his side. Barbra Streisand. What could go wrong?

FOX NEWS COMMENTATOR: North Korea loves John Kerry.

FOX NEWS COMMENTATOR: Really?

FOX NEWS COMMENTATOR: Yeah.

The current cheap shot is that he’s an indecisive French wimp.

FOX NEWS COMMENTATOR: They’re saying John Kerry looks French.

FOX NEWS COMMENTATOR: John Kerry looks French.

FOX NEWS COMMENTATOR: Kerry, the man who would be America’s first French president.

FOX NEWS COMMENTATOR: When you’re at war, there are the two models. You have the Churchill, Reagan, Thatcher, Tony Blair, George Bush model, or you have the McGovern, Jimmy Carter, French, John Kerry model.

FOX NEWS COMMENTATOR: Are the Republicans going to effectively be able to make Kerry French?

FOX NEWS COMMENTATOR: Good afternoon, everybody, or as John Kerry would say, bonjour.

CLOTAIRE RAPAILLE, ARCHETYPE DISCOVERIES CHAIRMAN (BEING INTERVIEWED ON FOX): French are thinkers. And that doesn’t go into the code of the American presidency. I mean, you know the French are ’The Thinker’, ’Le Penseur’ of Rodin. I mean, they think, they think, they think and they never do anything with their thinking. I believe that Mr Kerry has to get away from this image if he wants to win. Right now, he is not in the American archetype. Why? He’s on vacation. If the archetype is to take action and you are taking vacation, I mean, you are definitely not, you don’t fit the code. You are off-code.

FOX NEWS COMMENTATOR: Mr Rapaille?

CLOTAIRE RAPAILLE: Yes.

FOX NEWS COMMENTATOR: Thank you very much. You are hereby invited back.

CLARA FRENK: I saw three distinct types of people who were on the air at Fox. The first group was the true believers - these were people who not only believed the message, but who honestly and truly believed that they were serving a vital public interest because the rest of the media were hopelessly corrupted by liberalism. The second group were the opportunists - these were people who just wanted to be on the air, who just wanted a pay check. And then the third group were people who actually wanted to produce real news, and who were actually deceived into believing that they were working for a real news organisation. And these were the people who were the most frustrated. They were definitely in the minority and these were also the people who almost all ended up quitting.

New York loves to put on a show, but Fox News has been less accommodating. It has declined our repeated requests for interviews and wouldn’t let us film inside its studios.

Its written statement contains what amounts to a threat. It said in a written statement that: "If any news organizations decide to make this an anti-Fox News story, then all of their material becomes fodder immediately for possible out-of-context and biased documentaries."

In the movie itself, Rupert Murdoch rejects the criticism of his network.

RUPERT MURDOCH: There is diversity of opinion on Fox News. You may disagree with that. We have many liberals there, many liberals invited, we have the liberal commentators, as we have conservative ones.

WOMAN: Who are your liberal commentators?

RUPERT MURDOCH: Alan Colmes, for one. Um, Gretta Van Susteren. It’s in the eye of the beholder, I guess.

GRETTA VAN SUSTEREN, FOX NEWS COMMENTATOR: You’re watching Fox News, real journalism, fair and balanced.

JEFF COHEN: Either way, internally, ’Fair and Balanced’ is considered a joke. You know, you could be watching something in the green room at Fox News and you’ll see something that’s purely turning the Republican line, you know, just spouting it, and you turn to a friend, often those on the right wing because those are most of the pundits there, and you say, "Wow, that was fair and balanced!" And everyone in the room will laugh.

Rupert Murdoch’s news network is unlike anything the US television industry has seen before.

WOMAN PROTESTER: Stop the lies. Democratic media now!

And despite this demonstration, its popularity and influence are spreading.

TIM GRAHAM: It has changed the media debate. You’ve certainly heard a lot of talk here in America now about - "Do people only watch the news they agree with?" And the only reason that the liberal media establishment can ask that question now is because conservatives have a channel which they feel, "Hey, this channel doesn’t utterly make us out to be monsters."

JEFF COHEN: The corporate media gets worse. It gets more tabloid, more irrelevant, more right-wing.

Even though long-term Fox contributor Jeff Cohen continues to speak out against his old network, he knows its rivals are now copying it.

JEFF COHEN: When I was at MSNBC, we were imitating Fox. The orders from management - when we had one anti-war guest, we had to book two pro-war guests.

Two?

JEFF COHEN: Yes. If we had two left-wing guests, we had to book three right-wing guests. One meeting a producer said, "Why don’t we book Michael Moore?" and was immediately told, "Well, then you’d have to have three conservatives for balance." So, Foxification is affecting the American television news across the board.

As the US presidential election moves into overdrive, the Fox is unlikely to be silenced anytime soon.

MARK DAVIS: Peter Martin with that report. And the film ’OutFoxed’ opens nationally next month.