Lawrence resident Joshua Montgomery and his friend Sam Kimery were at a screening of the documentary “Outfoxed” — a polemic against Rupert Murdoch and his conservative Fox News Channel — in Tulsa last August when the idea hit them: What if you could just block Fox News Channel out?

“I turned to him and said, ‘How easy would it be to trap out the channel?'” Montgomery said, “and he looked back and said, ‘Not very hard.'”

The result of their collaboration is a product called the “Fox Blocker,” a tiny silver bit of metal that screws into the backs of most televisions and allows people to filter out Fox News.

To be precise, the Fox Blocker is a remarketed, not a new, product. Channel traps have been used by cable companies for years, but never marketed as the antidote to a controversial network.

“Basically, when you order a blocker, you tell us what channel Fox News is on your cable system, and then we program the trap to block that channel out,” Montgomery said.

Since the pair launched www.foxblocker.com and began selling the channel traps over the Internet, Montgomery estimated they have sold nearly 1,000. The proceeds from the sales, he said, will be donated to a media watchdog group.

The product has attracted plenty of attention — some complimentary and some angry. Kimery said he’s even had death threats.

“Apparently the making of terroristic threats against those who don’t share your views is a high art form among a certain core audience,” said Kimery, who lives in Tulsa.

“The most frequent e-mail I get is the, ‘Why don’t you sell a blocker for all the left-wing media out there?'” Montgomery said.

While Fox News may be controversial, a Fox spokeswoman at the station’s New York headquarters said the channel’s ratings speak for themselves. For the first three months of this year, Fox has been averaging 1.62 million viewers in prime-time, compared with CNN’s 805,000, according to Nielsen Media Research.

But Kimery and Montgomery’s motives go deeper than preventing people from watching the channel, which Kimery acknowledges can be done without the Blocker. He likens the device to burning a draft card, a tangible example of disagreement. And he’s taking this message to the network’s advertisers. After buying the $8.95 device online, would-be blockers are shown a letter that they can send to advertisers via the Fox Blocker site.

“The point is not to block the channel or block free speech but to raise awareness,” said Kimery, who works in the tech industry.

Still, despite a perception that Fox leans to the right, some media critics think the station provides an important glimpse into a political point of view. Matthew Felling, media director for the Center for Media and Public Affairs, said people who lean left should not necessarily tune out Fox News.

“It’s tough to engage in an argument when you’re not participating in it,” Felling said. “It’s just one more layer in the wall that the right and the left are building in between each other.”

Montgomery, on the other hand, think the blocker’s wall-building powers are a positive.

“Kids will no longer be exposed to right-wing nut jobs,” he said.

— The Associated Press contributed to this report.