Roger Friedman

Roger Friedman is an American film critic and entertainment news journalist. Friedman created and wrote the FOX411 news column on Foxnews.com for 10 years. He is the founder and editor-in-chief of Showbiz 411, an entertainment news and film review column which started with The Hollywood Reporter. 2Career Among Friedman’s activities in celebrity journalism have been writing the “Intelligencer” column at New York magazine and editing Fame magazine, where he wrote cover stories on Paul McCartney, Whitney Houston, Paloma Picasso, Carly Simon, and other stars. He has also written articles which have appeared in Vogue, The New York Times, the New York Daily News, Redbook, Us Weekly, Premiere, The Washington Post, and other publications.With D. A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus, Friedman co-produced Only the Strong Survive, a 2002 documentary film about Memphis soul musicians The film was shown in the Directors' Fortnight at the Cannes Film Festival, and at the Sundance and Telluride film festivals. 2Fox News Friedman worked for Fox News as a journalist for ten years, starting Fox News's website and creating the popular Fox411 column. Among other things was his coverage of Michael Jackson's child molestation trial in 2005. In April 2009, Friedman was fired by Foxnews.com after he reviewed the film X-Men Origins: Wolverine based on viewing a bootlegged copy of the movie online. (Friedman later told Gawker.com that he had not downloaded the film, but had streamed it after finding a link to it online.) Friedman's column was perceived as an endorsement of film piracy and illegal file sharing, particularly by the film's distributor, 20th Century Fox, which, like Foxnews.com, is a unit of News Corporation. Ironically, Friedman's review of Wolverine was very favorable, including comments such as "I am, in fact, amazed about how great Wolverine turned ou