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. "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. "There are hard cases and there are easy cases," he concluded. As it was, he was simply tossing the case out of court three days into the hearing.
He also warned Fox that the phrase "fair and balanced" was so generic that he was tempted to invalidate their trademark altogether. "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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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.
