Al Franken: Throwing Punches and Punch Lines

Al Franken: Throwing Punches and Punch Lines
By Howard Kurtz - Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, August 28, 2003; Page C01

In the world according to Al Franken, Rupert Murdoch is "evil," Bill O'Reilly is "a right-wing blowhard of the schoolyard bully variety," Sean Hannity is "incredibly obnoxious," Paul Gigot defends Wall Street Journal editorials that are "mind-blowingly asinine," and mainstream media types are, well, a bunch of wimps who dance to the tune of these all-powerful conservatives.

Which isn't to say he has lost his sense of humor. The former "Saturday Night Live" comic knows how to deliver a punch line along with a punch, as is evident in his new book.

You may have heard about the title -- "Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right" -- because of a futile Fox News lawsuit charging that Franken had no right to borrow its "fair and balanced" slogan. And the book doesn't quite meet the hallowed F&B standard. In fact, it's a bit of a screed. Al Franken, jokester, has become a liberal man on a mission.

"I was mad," Franken said yesterday from New York. "I got angry because I don't see this as an honest administration and the right-wing media has grown and is a shill for the guy and he can rely on them to spread his lies."

Translation: He's mad.

As for mainstream journalists, "I think they're intimidated by charges of liberal bias. There are so many other biases in all the mainstream media: pack mentality. Sensationalism. Sex. Conflict. Getting it cheap. Getting it first instead of getting it right." To ask whether the establishment press has a liberal bias "is like asking whether al Qaeda uses too much oil in their hummus."

Not surprisingly, Franken has some fierce critics, among them the host of "The O'Reilly Factor," whose face adorns the book's cover. "You have a movement among the ultraleft to discredit me and Fox News Channel any way they can," O'Reilly said yesterday. "They can't win the debate. They can't win the ratings war. So let's turn to defamation and we'll hide behind the satirist's label to defame. We don't have to be honest and accurate. It's a charade -- people see it for what it is. It had to be exposed, and that's what that lawsuit did."

The view inside Fox News is that the suit -- which called Franken "shrill" and "unstable," among other choice adjectives -- was a public relations train wreck that embarrassed the network and boosted Franken's book, which is being rushed into stores to capitalize on the publicity. These sources say that top executives, including Fox News Chairman Roger Ailes, argued against the suit, but that O'Reilly was so loudly adamant that the network went along to placate its prime-time star.

As Franken sees it, "this was about one of their anchors being in an infantile rage and demanding that they do this. They miscalculated that a news organization probably shouldn't be trying to suppress free speech." Fox dropped the suit Monday after a federal judge rejected its request for an injunction.

Even O'Reilly conceded that "we never thought we were going to win the lawsuit. We wanted to expose the vicious tactics being used by the far left."

Franken is so serious about his conservative-media-are-taking-over indictment that he hopes to host a radio program if two major Democratic Party donors, Sheldon and Anita Drobny, can achieve their goal of creating a liberal network by early next year. Talk radio is too dominated by conservatives to do it on an existing network, Franken said, but if the Drobnys "can get enough clearances to make it worth my while, I'll do it."

Here, according to "Lies," is the Franken analysis: "The mainstream media does not have a liberal bias. . . . ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, the New York Times, The Washington Post, Time, Newsweek and the rest -- at least try to be fair."

But the right-wing media -- Fox News, the Washington Times, the New York Post, the Journal editorial page, talk radio -- are "biased," the book declares. They have "an agenda." They are "not interested in conveying the truth." They "concoct an inflammatory story that serves their political goals. ('Al Gore's a liar.') They repeat it. ('Al Gore lies again!') They embellish it. ('Are his lies pathological, or are they merely malicious?') They try to push it into the mainstream media. All too often they succeed." They used such tactics "to discredit Gore and put Bush into office," and now "to silence Bush's critics."

"Lies" contains lots of citations and statistics because Franken, during a fellowship this year at Harvard's Shorenstein press center, was given 14 research assistants to help him scour the media archives. Critics will undoubtedly find it as selective as the conservative books (by Ann Coulter and Bernard Goldberg, among others) that he skewers.

Franken doesn't give all liberals a pass. He's rather rough on Alan Colmes, the liberal half of the Fox talk show "Hannity & Colmes." He prints his name in tiny type like this: Alan. He says Alan is "Sean's liberal on-air punching bag." He says he told the "moderate milquetoast" at the White House Correspondents' Dinner that he was "laying down" by not challenging Hannity's distortions, which Colmes vigorously denied.

Franken doesn't merely denounce conservatives. He harasses them, provokes them, gets right up in their faces. He once called up National Review Editor Rich Lowry and challenged him to a fight in a parking garage. Lowry declined.

"Comedians who aren't funny have to try to become political spokesmen -- thus Al Franken's new career," Lowry said yesterday. "But if I said I was unhappy that such an ill-informed and unpleasant man is emerging as a Democratic Party spokesman, I'd be lying."

Franken once telephoned Gigot, the Journal's editorial page editor, who responded angrily, according to the book: "You just want to be able to say that you called Paul Gigot and that he couldn't defend his editorial, so you can put it in your book and sell more copies."

"Frankly, I was hurt," Franken writes.

Gigot said yesterday that Franken started reading from two editorials on gun control, one many years old, "and wanted me to respond to his claim that they were contradictory, or unfair, or something. He didn't mention any book."

When Gigot said he would have to look up the editorials and Franken acknowledged he was writing a book, "I replied that this is a case of no good deed goes unpunished: I return a call as a courtesy and get ideologically ambushed without a chance to check what we've written. Believe me, my tone was more amazed than angry." Gigot says he offered to respond if Franken would send him the details, but the comedian never did.

Franken even writes of baiting Barbara Bush, the former first lady, on a January 2000 plane trip, imitating her son's manner of laughing and suggesting that would be good fodder for comics -- until she dismissed him with a scowl.

The book's tone careens between serious analysis and playground taunts (chapters include "Ann Coulter: Nutcase" and "I Bitch-Slap Bernie Goldberg"). Franken says, for example, that his chief Fox antagonist should be called "Bill O'Lie-lly." The two got into a dustup at a booksellers' convention this year over Franken's criticism that O'Reilly had claimed that the show he previously anchored, "Inside Edition," had won a Peabody award, when it was actually a Polk award granted after O'Reilly left the program.

O'Reilly said this was a minor error that he was happy to correct. Franken, he said, "is not a satirist. He's an activist" and part of an effort to "destroy" Fox News.

Said Franken: "I don't want to make it personal, and Bill O'Reilly really has. He's gone after me and said I'm a smear artist. He has not pointed out one thing I've said that isn't true."

What's less clear, amid the name-calling, is how the Minnesota native went from writing groundbreaking material for the likes of Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi in the 1970s to becoming an unabashed partisan. After all, Franken wrote and starred in the movie "Stuart Saves His Family" and the sitcom "Lateline," and did political shtick on Comedy Central.

But beginning with his 1996 book "Rush Limbaugh Is a Big Fat Idiot," which rocketed to the top of the New York Times bestseller list, Franken has increasingly staked out the angry-man territory on the left.

"I'm extremely lucky," Franken said. "I'm lucky God gave me some gifts. I don't have a formal religion, even though I'm Jewish, but I've been extremely blessed. I have a wife I've been married to for 27 years and two great kids. But the idea that this is all my doing and I don't owe anything to anybody for it. . . . That fuels the anger against people who are wealthy and equally blessed. They believe they don't owe anything to anybody else. They're entitled to their tax cut at a time when people at the bottom are losing Medicaid." And he's off and running again.

But in writing such a strident book, doesn't he risk being branded the sort of ideological warrior he spends so much energy attacking?

"First of all, I'm funny," Franken said. "It's done for comedic purpose. And I don't lie."