Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them

Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them
Author(s)	Al Franken
Language	English
Subject(s)	American politics/Conservatism
Genre(s)	Political satire
Publisher	E.P. Dutton
Publication date	2003
Media type	Hardcover/paperback
Preceded by	Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot and Other Observations
Followed by	The Truth (With Jokes)

Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them is a satirical book on American politics by comedian, political commentator and now Senator Al Franken, published in 2003 by Dutton, a subsidiary in the Penguin Group. Franken had a study group of 14 Harvard graduate students known as "TeamFranken" to help him with the research. The book's subtitle, "A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right," is a parody of Fox News' tagline "Fair and Balanced." Fox sued Franken over the use of the phrase in a short-lived lawsuit, which has been credited with increasing the sales of the book.

Lies is one of several books published in 2003 written by American liberals challenging the viewpoints of conservatives such as Bernard Goldberg, Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity and Ann Coulter. These books by Franken and fellow authors such as Joe Conason, Michael Moore and Jim Hightower were described by columnist Molly Ivins as the "great liberal backlash of 2003."

Summary

Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them largely targets prominent Republicans and conservatives, highlighting what Franken asserts are documentable lies in their claims. A significant portion of the book is devoted to comparisons between President George W. Bush and former president Bill Clinton regarding their economic, environmental, and military policies. Franken also criticizes several pundits, especially those he believes to be the most dishonest, including O'Reilly, Hannity, and Coulter.

In Lies, Franken divides American media into two groups: the mainstream media, which attempts to be objective, and the right-wing media, which does not. "The mainstream media", Franken wrote, "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." Franken notes that, while the mainstream media do have biases toward sensationalism, the easy story, and soft news, the right wing media, including Fox News, The Washington Times, and the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal, "are not interested in conveying the truth." He argues that they exist to further the cause of American conservatism by advancing stories and themes that work to the benefit of conservatives and to the detriment of liberals.

Franken seeks to debunk the claim that the mainstream American media are liberally biased. Franken believes that the claim of media "liberal bias" is a myth used by conservative politicians. Propagating this myth, Franken asserts, serves three functions. First, it creates reluctance among mainstream media outlets to cover issues that conservatives don't want them to, for fear that they will be accused of having a liberal bias. Second, it allows conservatives to deny or dismiss reports in the mainstream media, regardless of whether they are true, because they have discredited the source already. Third, attacking the media can be effective at increasing conservative voter turnout.

Franken on book tour

The book criticizes several conservative authors and pundits by pointing out factual inaccuracies and deceptive statements he says they have made. Franken criticizes Ann Coulter on a number of points related to what Franken alleges as abuses or violations of journalistic ethics in her book Slander. In addition to accusing her of lying, Franken accuses Coulter of deliberately misusing citations in order to further a misleading political agenda. Coulter, when challenged on the accuracy of statements within the book, frequently said that Slander had 780 footnotes. Franken points out that merely having 780 citations makes readers less likely to actually check them. He also notes that Coulter's citations are not footnotes in a literal sense, but rather endnotes, which are located at the end of the book rather than the foot of the page. Readers, Franken contends, are far less likely to refer to endnotes. To attempt to prove this point, Lies has two endnotes, one of which merely notes how hard the endnotes were to find. Franken also cites instances where Coulter misuses her citations to attribute offensive or outlandish statements to people who did not make them.

Franken also criticizes former CBS reporter Bernard Goldberg for what he claims is selective decontextualized quoting and other dishonest material in his book Bias: A CBS Insider Exposes How the Media Distort the News. Franken recounts an incident on Phil Donahue's talk show on MSNBC when he confronted Goldberg about a misleading quote attributed to NBC anchor and commentator John Chancellor.

The book also criticizes Bill O'Reilly, with whom Al Franken has a public feud. Franken accuses O'Reilly of being a serial and pathological liar, recounting multiple controversies relating to O'Reilly, including O'Reilly's inaccurate statements regarding Peabody awards (O'Reilly claims the show Inside Edition, which he anchored from 1989 to 1995, had won the Peabody Award twice; the show has not won the Peabody Award, although it did win the George Polk Award in 1996, after O'Reilly had already left), his heated interview with Jeremy Glick, and his boycott of Pepsi for hiring rap artist Ludacris. Franken pokes fun at O'Reilly for moralizing about the sexually explicit and violent themes of Ludacris' songs despite having himself written a book, Those Who Trespass, which contains violent and sexual imagery and profanity. Franken also recounts his heated confrontation with O'Reilly at BookExpo America 2003, seen on C-SPAN.

He goes on to talk about a number of factual innacuracies in Sean Hannity's book Let Freedom Ring and, when referring to Hannity's "partner" on his Fox news show, Alan Colmes, always prints the latter's name in a small font in order to emphasize the diminutive (usually silent, frequently interrupted) role he plays on the show.

He then argues, extensively, that the Bush administration projected blame for 9/11 terrorist attacks onto the Clinton administration--when, Franken demonstrates, Clinton did more than any other pre-9/11 president to fight terrorism--and Osama bin Laden in particular--and it was the Bush administration which failed to heed Clinton's warnings and to prevent the attacks. He also gives Bill Clinton's military decisions most of the credit for Bush's (then-apparent) victories in Afghanistan and Iraq.

He also talks about "the tone" in Washington that Bush promised in 2000 to change, saying that it was created by the Republicans--and could be traced to an obscene remark by Richard Mellon Scaife to a reporter, who had grilled him on his connections to conservative organization, in 1981--and it only got worse after Bush took office. He comments that he "grows discouraged" after seeing the Bush administration and Republicans politicize 9/11--including draft dodger Saxby Chambliss's defeating in 2002 of Vietnam veteran, and triple amputee, and Senator Max Cleland by attacking the latter's patriotism.

He also has a chapter on the environmental impact of factory farms and how it reflects on Bush's environmental record.

The book also features a number of unrelated essays:

• The practice of slanting news copy rightward at the Washington Times newspaper, called "Prudenizing" after the paper's executive editor, Wesley Pruden. Franken describes the concept in general terms and then tells a story of an instance where he was the one Prudenized: in a column by Bill McCaslon covering a 1999 photographers' association event where Franken was performing.
• A report from the 2003 White House Correspondents Association dinner, at which Franken "engage[s] in slightly hostile banter" with Defense Policy Board Advisory Committee chairman Richard Perle, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz (who says "fuck you" to Franken, a fact he would repeat throughout the rest of the book and in his next book The Truth (with jokes)), Fox News' Alan Colmes and Brian Kilmeade, and Secretary of Commerce Donald Evans.
• The death and memorial service of Senator Paul Wellstone (D-MN). Although it was billed as a memorial service and celebration of Wellstone's life, the few overtly partisan parts of a few eulogies were blown out of proportion by right-wing pundits, including Rush Limbaugh, Peggy Noonan, and Tucker Carlson, an effect intended to create the impression that the event had been turned into a political rally for Wellstone's replacement on the ballot, former Vice President Walter Mondale.
• "Fun With Racism", An essay on racism in the Republican party, in which Franken postulates that the presence of black people in the Republican party serves not to appeal to black voters, but rather to white voters that wouldn't otherwise vote for an overtly-racist party. As evidence, he claims that every black Republican elected official in the United States got to speak at the 2000 Republican National Convention in Philadelphia. He points out the frequency with which the Republican Party touts the membership of Colin Powell and Condoleeza Rice, even when they disagree with the rest of the Bush administration. He also points to an organization called the African-American Republican Leadership Council, which at the time featured almost no African-American members save for former Senator Edward Brooke (R-MA), who said he was unaware that the group had named him its honorary chairman.
• Franken and research assistant Andrew Barr travel to Bob Jones University, with Andrew posing as a prospective student and Al as a family friend, in order to ask embarrassing questions to the admissions staff, about such issues as BJU's former ban on interracial dating and its lack of accreditation.
• "Abstinence Heroes", a pair of chapters on sex education. Although Franken starts by listing the evidence that abstinence-only sex education is ineffective at preventing teenage pregnancy and the spread of STDs, he jokingly suggests that the real reason why abstinence-only sex education is ineffective is that abstinence is seen as "uncool". Seeking to fix this, Franken sends a letter to numerous political and media figures asking for abstinence-related anecdotes to be printed in a collection titled Savin' It! Not only did this stunt get no positive responses, Franken himself gets in trouble for sending the letters on Harvard University letterhead (as he was writing the book while serving as a fellow at Harvard's Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy).
• "The Waitress and the Lawyer", a one-act play set in a diner in Texas, which features a conversation between a tax attorney earning $250,000 per year and a waitress earning $25,000 per year. The attorney explains to the waitress how the income tax cut she receives is more than offset by the reduced funding for other government programs such as SCHIP, subsidized housing, and public transportation.
• "The No-Child-Left-Behind Standardized Test", which is presented in the style of a standardized multiple-choice exam, and which points out that the No Child Left Behind Act actually leaves behind over 16% of American school children.

There are 2 comic book-style chapters:

1. "The Gospel of Supply-Side Jesus"--parodying the seemingly un-Christian policies of Republicans who frequently invoke Christianity.
2. "Operation Chickenhawk: Episode One"--which features Vietnam veterans (and prominent Democrats) John Kerry and Al Gore leading a group of popular neoconservatives--none of whom actually served in the Vietnam War--into battle, only to get fragged by the cowardly "chickenhawk" neocons.

Publicity

See also: Fox v. Franken

Fox News sought damages from Franken, claiming in its lawsuit that the book's subtitle violated its trademark of the slogan "Fair and Balanced". The lawsuit was dismissed, and the attempt backfired on Fox News in that it provided Franken with free publicity just as the book was launched. "The book was originally scheduled to be released Sept. 22 but will be made available Aug. 21," according to its publisher. "We sped up the release because of tremendous demand for the book, generated by recent events."

In the lawsuit, Fox described Franken as "intoxicated or deranged" as well as "shrill and unstable." In response, Franken joked that he had trademarked the word "funny", and that Fox had infringed his intellectual property rights by characterizing him as "unfunny." The publicity resulting from the lawsuit propelled Franken's yet-to-be-released book to #1 on Amazon.com.

On August 22, 2003, U.S. District Judge Denny Chin denied Fox's request for an injunction to block the publication of Franken's book, characterizing the network's claim as "wholly without merit, both factually and legally." During the judge's questioning, spectators in the court's gallery frequently laughed at Fox's case. Franken later joked, "Usually when you say someone was literally laughed out of court, you mean they were figuratively laughed out of court, but Fox was literally laughed out of court." Three days later, Fox filed papers to drop its lawsuit.

Franken describes the legal battle in a paperback-only chapter of Lies entitled "I Win".

Book critiques

Difficulty posed by use of satire and nonfiction

In a largely favorable review of Franken's book in the Washington newspaper The Hill, reviewer Mary Lynn F. Jones wrote: "Franken's tendency to mix fact with fiction [also] left me wondering sometimes what was true and what wasn't." As an example, she cited a passage in Franken's book in which he wrote that former Bush foreign policy advisor Richard Armitage "bolted" from a Senate hearing and "[knocked] over veteran reporter Helen Thomas, breaking her hip and jaw". The paperback version has a footnote saying, "The Helen Thomas thing is a joke."

Recognition

The audiobook version was awarded the 2004 Grammy Award for Best Spoken Word Album.

Editions

• ISBN 0-525-94764-7 (hardcover, 2003)
• ISBN 0-452-28521-6

See also

• Media bias