Politics: When this book was published in the US, Fox News rushed to court, contending that the phrase "fair and balanced" was its trade-mark slogan for news and commentary.
A federal judge denied an injunction to block publication, reasoning that Franken's right to parody Rupert Murdoch's cable news channel was protected by the First Amendment.
However, the publicity helped propel this satirical critique of the rhetoric of right-wing pundits to No.1 in the New York Times non-fiction bestseller list. Four of the top six bestsellers (as of September 28th) are now unsympathetic to the right, revealing disillusionment with the ultra-conservatives who raucously defend the Bush administration.
This also indicates a hunger for antidotes to reckless conservative authors such as Ann Coulter, whose Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism (a defence of McCarthyism) is currently at No.7 and who merits a chapter in Franken's book under the heading, 'Ann Coulter: Nut Case'.
The Fox legal action was apparently taken on behalf of its star right-wing commentator, Bill O'Reilly, who also gets a chapter to himself, entitled, with equal understatement, 'Bill O'Reilly: Lying, Splotchy Bully'. O'Reilly was particularly incensed by the blotchy picture of himself on the cover of Franken's book.
The chapter describes in hilarious detail a row between the two at a panel discussion for authors in Los Angeles. It started when Franken claimed, in front of the audience, that O'Reilly wrongly boasted that a TV show he once hosted called Inside Edition had won two Peabodys, the most prestigious award in television journalism. O'Reilly made this claim in interviews on three different programmes (Franken had dug up the transcripts). However, Inside Edition had not won a Peabody, only a single, less prestigious, Polk award, and that after O'Reilly had left the show.
Franken passed this on to a journalist, who wrote it up, and O'Reilly then complained that he was a victim of lies. "I'll give you an example," he said on Fox. "Guy says about me, couple of weeks ago, 'O'Reilly says he won a Peabody award'. Never said it. You can't find a transcript where I said it."
Franken describes how O'Reilly fumed as he finished telling the story to the panel audience. "I could see him stewing, gripping his pen with seething fury," he writes. "My wife, watching on television three thousand miles away, thought that Bill was going to jam the pen through my eyeball and into my brain. But I was having fun. Not because I enjoy attacking people gratuitously. But because O'Reilly is a bully and he deserved it. Everything I had said was true. On his show, O'Reilly cuts off anyone who disagrees with him. If they stand up for themselves, he shouts them down. But this wasn't his show."
Franken cites other instances where O'Reilly misspoke, such as saying he did not register to vote as a Republican in 1994, which is contradicted on his voter registration form (reprinted in the book) where he ticked political allegiance as Republican.
Franken's contention is that the rhetoric of the right is based on lies and that conservative pundits such as O'Reilly, Coulter, and Fox's Sean Hannity deliberately twist information to make their case. (There's a thesis to be written on how conservative American commentators tend to have Irish names such as O'Reilly and Hannity, while the best liberal comics such as Al Franken, and television satirists Jon Stewart and Bill Maher, are Jewish).
Franken accuses Hannity of hypocrisy for attacking Bill Clinton in May 1999 for sending troops to Kosovo and then saying that one shouldn't take "cheap political partisan shots at the commander-in-chief" when it was Bush going to war. He has a lot of fun with Ann Coulter who, to support her claim that the mainstream media is in the hands of lefties, had made the point that Newsweek's Washington bureau chief Evan Thomas was the son of well-known socialist Norman Thomas. Franken called up Thomas and asked if it was true. "No," replied Thomas, adding "Al, is this about that Ann Coulter thing . . . Is there something wrong with her?" Franken's point in all this is that the mainstream media in America tries to be fair, but the right-wing media, which includes Fox News, the Wall Street Journal editorial pages, the Washington Times and the New York Post, have an agenda that plays fast and loose with the truth.
He makes it his mission to discomfit them and get up the noses of the Bush people. At a Washington dinner, he approached Paul Wolfowitz and said, "Hi, Dr Wolfowitz. Hey, the Clinton military did a great job in Iraq, didn't it?" Wolfowitz thought for a couple of seconds and then replied: "F**k you." Franken is more concerned about putting the boot in than with the finer points of intellectual discourse, but he backs up his counterpunches with research by a group of Harvard students called TeamFranken who check the utterances of the blow-hards against LexisNexis. This book is fun, but at times too much of a rant, some of the punches are wild, and it is badly in need of editing. Nevertheless, taken with other assaults against the windmills of the right (by Michael Moore in Stupid White Men and Jon Stewart in his Emmy-winning Daily Show for example), it does more to soften up the Republicans as elections approach than the so-called liberal media.
Conor O'Clery is North American Editor of The Irish Times
Lies And the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right. Al Franken. Allen Lane, pp 377. £12