The Fox News Channel isn’t taking a “fair and balanced” view of a documentary that accuses it of being a mouthpiece and propaganda arm for the Bush administration.

The film, Robert Greenwald’s “Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s War on Journalism,” relentlessly attacks Fox for manipulating the news and choosing stories based on a conservative Republican agenda.

The Michael Moore-style documentary has created a buzz in journalistic circles for weeks and revved up conservative cyber-gossip Matt Drudge. The argument over it threatened to accelerate to a bare-knuckle brawl from veiled threats.

It burst into full public view yesterday, when the guerrilla filmmaker held a press conference to tout the film, which is partly funded by the liberal organization MoveOn.org and will be previewed tonight at the New School University. The 75-minute film has no distributor, but there will be more than 2,000 house parties nationwide next week hosted by MoveOn.org, and Mr. Greenwald is selling DVD copies for $9.95.

For years, critics have accused Fox News Channel of a right-wing bias and contended that Fox bludgeoned President Clinton and his wife, Hillary, over everything from Whitewater to Monica Lewinsky and has been an ardent supporter of President Bush and the Iraq war.

Fox says it is an antidote to the liberal bias of CNN, MSNBC, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times, among others. Fox commentators Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly have repeatedly taken mainstream news outlets to task for their coverage and won wide viewership in the process.

Fox News Channel, led by Roger Ailes, a conservative so hated by the left that he inspires Web sites and blogs dedicated to smearing him, became the no. 1 cable news network, steamrolling past CNN, and its hit show “The O’Reilly Factor” became the top-rated program on cable.

Enter Mr. Greenwald, who said he began talking to former Fox employees about a year ago to make a movie about what he calls the “Foxification” of TV news. His past credits included the 2003 documentary “Uncovered: The Whole Truth About the Iraq War” and “The Crooked E: The Unshredded Truth about Enron,” a TV feature.

His newest film weaves together quotations from memos from management to reporters, interviews with former Fox employees, and, most heavily, clips of Fox News, in an attempt to show that network executives slanted coverage of the war, the presumed Democratic presidential nominee, Senator Kerry, and activist Jesse Jackson, and that they gave extensive coverage to stories like President Reagan’s 90th birthday and President Bush’s campaign rallies.

The film places particular emphasis on Mr. O’Reilly, showing his heavy use of the phrase “shut up” and his alleged mistreatment of the son of a 9/11 victim in an interview.

Fox countered the movie’s message with a guerrilla tactic of its own, sending a member of its public relations team to yesterday’s press conference to distribute a statement of response to the crowd of reporters on hand. Among other things, the statement accused the New York Times of conspiring with liberal billionaire George Soros and of “corrupting the journalistic process.” The Times declined to comment.

The Drudge Report contended last week that Fox was planning to retaliate against any network that gave extensive coverage to the documentary, but yesterday the network challenged “any news organization that believes this story is big and that Fox News Channel is a problem” to release all of its memos and editorial direction. In exchange, Fox News said it would do the same to “let the public decide who is fair.”

Fox said two of the so-called former employees in the documentary never worked directly for Fox. It also said that another, former reporter Jon Du Pre, was fired for incompetence.

Mr. Du Pre was quoted in the film saying, “We weren’t necessarily, as it was told to us, a news-gathering organization so much as we were a proponent of a point of view.”

Fox has picked up a few unlikely allies in its fight against the documentary.

The Washington Post’s journalism critic, Howard Kurtz, said the film used cheap movie tricks to distort its arguments, and a Los Angeles Times columnist said the Fox slogan “We report, you decide” is “baloney, of course,” but many people want opinionated journalism.

At the press conference, a Fox senior correspondent, Eric Shawn, pressed Mr. Greenwald about whether he had given Fox News Channel a chance to respond to the allegations. Mr. Greenwald tried to evade the question but ultimately conceded, “No, I didn’t.”

Later, Mr. Greenwald told reporters, “We know what their comment is, we see it 24 hours a day, seven days a week.”