A Fair And Balanced Look at Lies And the Lying Liars Who Tell Them
...iberal individuals sound uneducated, racist or extremely biased. Franken uses a quote from her book Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism where Coulter states that “New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman sniffed that racial profiling was not “civilized.” He blamed twenty years of relentless attacks by extremists on—I quote—‘religious fundamentalists of any stripe’ ” (Franken (Coulter) 21). The quote, in fact comes from an article entitled “Naked Air”, in which Friedman talks about making everyone fly nude. The quote, verbatim, gives a completely different meaning than Coulter’s butchered interpretation, and states “Think about it. If everybody flew naked not only would you never have to worry about the passenger next to you carrying box cutters or exploding shoes, but no religious fundamentalists of any stripe would ever be caught dead flying nude…” (Franken 22). Again, Franken exposes outright misleading information. A pertinent issue he focuses on is the 2000 Presidential Election. His uses of several instances where the mainstream media tear apart information relayed by candidate and, then, Vice-President Al Gore cements and support his theme that the media is NOT liberally biased. Overall the examples he uses from the media give credibility to his argument because they are cited well, instead of relying solely on his knowledge. Franken’s use of examples concerning Coulter, Goldberg, and the twisting of speeches made by Al Gore are all drawn from various genres of media which aid in refuting the belief of a ‘liberally’ biased media and work for him in his attempt to get his point across; all that is left is for readers to think critically. Besides the use of examples from newspapers, television and various other media sources, Franken relies on his sense of humor, personal experiences and creative writing abilities to get his thesis across. Chapters like Loving America the Al Franken Way, Chapter for American Book by Kharap Juta, Operation Chickenhawk: Episode One and The Waitress and the Lawyer: A One Act Play, to name a few, contain apparent sarcasm, humor and blatant rejection and distaste for right-wing hypocrisy. His sarcasm is given at intervals and work well for the majority of the book. Using cynicism with his diagrams and tables to show how apparent the lies are and how non liberally based the media was during the 2000 presidential election gives focus on the fact that the right-winged media are simply trying to point fingers at the mainstream media. This change in attention helps the right-wing media keep from getting focused on and called on their abundance of lies and purposeful misleading stories. Franken also uses feigned disbelieve when he comes to statistics that disprove the supposed liberal bias to reiterate the absurdity of such a notion. In chapter 7, The 2000 Presidential Election: How It Disproved the Hypothetical Liberal Media Paradigm Matrix, Franken goes into great detail with tables and diagrams to illustrate the lies concerning how the media treated George W. Bush and Al Gore during the 2000 Presidential campaign. Giving information taken from the Pew Charitable Trusts Project for Excellence in Journalism, he shows that the tone of coverage showed more positively for Bush and more negatively for Gore, but he doesn’t stop there. Using mocked disbelief he exclaims, “Holy shit! This makes no sense. The numbers for Gore, the liberal were more negative and a lot less positive that the numbers for Bush. The media, which we just assumed to be liberal, because that’s what we had heard so often, was actually nicer to the conservative! Could that possible be true?" (Franken 43). This transpires a multitude of times in the book, but the instances where he employs this feigned disbelief at his findings work to emphasize how ridiculous it is to surmise the mainstream media has a ‘liberal’ bias. Several times in the book he also relies on using personal experiences to establish how right-winged individuals in the media keep their bias regardless of the circumstances. His various encounters with Bill O’Reilly, host of numerous television and radio show known for their conservative overtones, not only pepper his book but also add to the fuel that the media is far from liberally biased. His chapters on O’Reilly also go to the heart of the book’s title “Lies And the Lying Liars Who Tell Them”. He cites and quotes many instances where O’Reilly has lied and lied and, when confronted with his lies, attacks those who just want to correct his error, not necessarily make his look foolish. For instance, Franken relays information regarding occasions when O’Reilly stated that, when he was host of Inside Edition, the show won two Peabody Awards. Franken goes on to show that after researching he disproved this claim and informed O’Reilly. O’Reilly realizes Inside Edition won a Polk award (after he’d been gone for a year), and tells Franken to “Go after me if you want” (Franken 73). Franken continues by stating, “So I did. I called Lloyd Grove at the Washington Post’s Reliable Source column. Lloyd ran with it on March 1, 2001…He also offered Bill the opportunity to respond and quoted him saying ‘Al Franken is on a jihad against me…’ ”. The culmination of this story results in O’Reilly being irate insisting he never said he’d won a Polk. Franken proves O’Reilly “had lied to cover up his ‘...