In article <biutaj$58t$1@pencil.math.missouri.edu>, MichaelP says...

I love this piece - I loved watching the video of Al Franken shredding 
O'Reilly at a Los Angeles book-fair. I love it when someone  shreds a 
demagogue with the facts.
These are VERY interesting times !!

Cheers

MichaelP

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http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/story.jsp?story=438014

Al Franken is a satirist, so it's his job to poke fun at powerful people. 
But when he appropriated the Fox News slogan, the fallout went right to 
the top. 

Andrew Gumbel examines a court case that left red faces in high places

_______________________________________

INDEPENDENT (London) 29 August 2003
	by Andrew Gumbel

Cast your mind forward to the morning of 3 November 2004. Imagine, just 
for a moment, that George W Bush has gone down to ignominious defeat in 
the US presidential election, his once sky-high popularity ratings 
pickaxed and bludgeoned into the ground like some rotten fencepost on a 
Texas ranch. All across the nation, people are asking where it all went 
wrong for the chief executive who had seemed so immune from criticism for 
so long.

And the answer, they all agree, is the moment that the mighty Fox News 
Channel - the red-meat chomping, propaganda-spewing, flag-waving, 
all-screaming, ratings-topping cable station doubling as chief baggage 
carrier for the Bush administration - was reduced to utter humiliation by 
a single pesky New York comedian.

Okay, I may be getting ahead of myself here. But it is absolutely true 
that Al Franken, a one-time writer and performer on Saturday Night Live 
who has made a splendid second career as a political satirist, has 
successfully turned the Rupert Murdoch-owned Fox News into a national 
laughing stock. In so doing, he has indeed struck a blow against an 
information (and disinformation) machine that has played a crucial role in 
spreading and enforcing the White House's with-us-or-against-us mentality. 
It is perhaps stretching the point to say that this is the beginning of 
the end of the Bush administration, even with Iraq going to hell and the 
economy down the toilet. But then, as you'll see, stretching the point is 
entirely in keeping with the nature of this story.

The cause of the trouble is Franken's new book, a typically unabashed 
blend of razor-witted denunciation and old-fashioned gumshoe detective 
work directed at right-wing crazies both in and out of government. The 
title says it all: Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and 
Balanced Look at the Right. It doesn't take too profound an insight into 
the workings of irony to spot that Franken is pastiching the overheated 
rhetoric regularly employed by the targets of his satire. Hence the 
decision to print the title word "Lies" in bold red lettering across the 
likenesses of President Bush, Vice-President Dick Cheney and two of the 
loudest screamers on the airwaves: Ann Coulter, a scary blonde banshee who 
regards all liberals as traitors, and who wrote shortly after September 11 
that "we should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert 
them to Christianity"; and Bill O'Reilly, who likes to torment the guests 
on his top-rated Fox News show, The O'Reilly Factor, rebutting their 
arguments with sophisticated epithets such as "pinhead" and "vicious son 
of a bitch".

Now, it so happens that the phrase "fair and balanced" is also the 
official Fox News slogan - and trademarked as such. It may seem an odd 
boast for a station that routinely goes out of its way not to give the 
other side of the story; which crowed with ill-concealed delight when Bush 
won his protracted legal struggle to become President; and crowed again 
when the Republicans swept the board in last November's mid-term 
elections. Perhaps the slogan is part of the deception whereby Fox News 
has sought - with considerable success - to push the parameters of 
political debate in the United States ever further to the right. Perhaps 
it is actually an indication that someone, somewhere has a sneaking sense 
of humour about the whole operation. Either way, you can understand why Al 
Franken felt compelled to put it into the title of his book.

But then the executives at Fox News made a fatal mistake. They rose to 
Franken's bait. Admittedly, he gave them every reason to be driven to 
distraction. Apart from the title and cover design, there was the fact 
that he had dug deep into the biographical background of O'Reilly and 
company and found them to be out-and-out liars about everything from 
family background to political party affiliation. (O'Reilly, claiming 
against all available evidence to be a voice of moderation, has always 
said he is a registered independent, but Franken found - and published - 
his voter registration form with a big black tick in the "Republican" box. 
Franken's chapter on O'Reilly is entitled "Lying, Splotchy Bully".)

A couple of weeks ago, Fox chose to sue Franken for trademark infringement 
for the use of the phrase "fair and balanced". With entirely straight 
faces, their lawyers argued that innocent bookstore customers might 
actually think that the book was somehow endorsed or underwritten by Fox 
News. And, while they were at it, they made an attempt at wholesale 
character assassination. Franken, their brief said, had appeared "either 
intoxicated or deranged" at the annual White House correspondents' dinner 
last April. He was, in any case, "increasingly unfunny". "He is not a 
well-respected voice in American politics. Rather, he appears to be shrill 
and unstable."

For Fox News to accuse anyone of being "shrill and unstable" is, of 
course, to invite immediate ridicule. One also has to question the wisdom 
of a television station accusing a comedian of losing his sense of humour 
in a way that causes half the world to burst into spontaneous laughter.

Franken, for his part, could not have been more thrilled. He was on 
holiday in Umbria when the lawsuit was filed, taking a few days to recover 

>from writing the book before launching into the publicity campaign for its 

publication, originally scheduled for next month. He had, in fact, just 
dozed off with his nose in a book when someone came into his room to tell 
him: "Al, you're being sued by Fox."

"It took me about a second and a half to register this. Then I said 
'Good!', and went back to sleep," Franken told me. The next morning, he 
put out a statement thanking Fox News from the bottom of his heart for 
providing more publicity than money could ever buy. His publisher, EP 
Dutton, promptly brought forward the book's release date - it came out 
last weekend - and advance orders sent it whizzing up Amazon's US sales 
charts from No 329 to No 1.

Then came the court hearing, which started on 22 August. Judge Denny Chin 
of the US District Court in New York clearly relished the occasion and 
reduced the gallery to squeals of helpless laughter as he posed a series 
of questions to the Fox lawyers.

"Do you think that the reasonable consumer, seeing the word 'lies' over Mr 
O'Reilly's face, would believe Mr O'Reilly is endorsing this book?" he 
asked. "To me, it's quite ambiguous," the hapless Fox lawyer, Dori Ann 
Hanswirth, replied to more laughter.

Judge Chin said a consumer would have to be "completely dense" not to 
realise that the cover was a joke. He also warned Fox that the phrase 
"fair and balanced" was so generic that he was tempted to invalidate their 
trademark altogether. As it was, he was simply tossing the case out of 
court three days into the hearing. "There are hard cases and there are 
easy cases," he concluded. "This is an easy case."

Franken's famous victory is being treated as little short of a godsend by 
President Bush's domestic opponents, who had begun to despair of ever 
finding a way to bypass the White House's highly insulated information 
pipeline feeding into a largely docile mainstream media. Particularly 
disheartening was the way the right-wing demagogues on radio and 
television - Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Michael Savage, as well as 
O'Reilly and Coulter - would always come across as so strident and sure of 
themselves, even as they spouted lies and bogus statistics. The more 
thoughtful, reasoned voices of the moderate middle and the liberal left, 
by contrast, would be routinely squelched, either because they couldn't 
get their soundbites together in the limited time available or because 
they would be cut off in mid-flow and fail to fight back.

Franken has found a way to redress this balance, and at the same time get 
under the skin of his adversaries like nobody else. His magic formula has 
two ingredients. The first is to throw back at his opponents the very 
techniques they use to such withering effect on others. Franken calls this 
political jujitsu - something he developed a few years ago when he wrote 
his hilarious, and devastating, deconstruction of the king of vulgar 
populist talk radio, Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot: and Other 
Observations. The second is, simply, to be funny. "Their value-added is 
lying and distorting, my value-added is humour," he tells me.

And Franken can be very funny. In his new book, already in its fifth 
printing, he writes a spoof letter to John Ashcroft, the ultraconservative 
Attorney General, asking him for a personal contribution to a book about 
the virtues of sexual abstinence. Franken suggests that Ashcroft, as a 
true believer, could be an ideal role model for young people aiming to 
save their virginity until after they are married. "Don't be afraid to 
share a moment when you were tempted to have sex, but were able to 
overcome your urges through willpower and strength of character. Be 
funny!" he writes. "Did a woman ever think you were homosexual just 
because you wouldn't have sex with her? Be serious... But most of all be 
real. Kids can spot a phoney a mile away."

Viewed from across the Atlantic, the humour might seem unnecessarily 
cruel. But that is to misunderstand the nature of the opponents Franken is 
up against. Take, as a particularly egregious example, Bill O'Reilly's 
interview this year with Jeremy Glick, the son of a New York Port 
Authority worker who died in the rubble of the World Trade Center. 
O'Reilly was mad at Glick because he had signed a petition opposing war in 
Iraq. So he laid into him, not just for "mouthing... a marginal position 
in this society", but also for offending the memory of his father with his 
criticisms of President Bush and US military power.

Glick tried to explain that his father had also disliked Bush and thought 
he had come to power illegitimately, but O'Reilly would have none of it. 
"You keep your mouth shut when you sit here exploiting those people," he 
fumed, calling Glick's views "a bunch of crap". O'Reilly then repeatedly 
shouted "Shut up!" before finally yanking off his guest's microphone and 
yelling after him, off camera: "Get out of my studio before I tear you to 
fucking pieces!"

Franken had his own set-to with O'Reilly a few months later, at a Los 
Angeles book fair. O'Reilly understandably felt uncomfortable sitting next 
to a giant poster of the cover of Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them, 
and his anger slowly rose to boiling point as Franken meticulously 
documented O'Reilly's lengthy history of false claims that he had won two 
Peabodys, among the most prestigious awards in US journalism. Finally 
O'Reilly exploded, calling Franken an idiot and telling him at least twice 
to shut up. On a radio show two days later he said that if he and Franken 
had been living in the Old West, "I would have put a bullet right between 
his head [sic]."

Several authoritative sources suggest that the impetus for the disastrous 
Fox lawsuit came from O'Reilly himself. There is certainly plenty of 
evidence that he cannot forgive Franken, referring to him recently as "a 
vile human being".

Franken, though, has no interest in turning this into a personal vendetta.  
For him, it is all about reinvigorating opposition to President Bush,
especially in the mainstream media which, in his view, became so cowed
after September 11 that "their balls went right back into their body
cavity". This might well be the moment, now that questions are being asked
about the reasons for invading Iraq and the Bush administration is being
more widely accused of peddling lies and distortions. "The wheels have
fallen off. The facade of Bush's credibility is beginning to crack,"
Franken says. And at least a part of that is down to him and his
exquisitely irritating new book.