Part comedian, part investigative reporter, Al Franken is a thorn in the flesh of rightwing America. He tells Oliver Burkeman about media lies, Dick Cheney's sex life, and seeing Fox News laughed out of court
Friday October 3, 2003
The Guardian
Al Franken does a convincing impression of being a well-balanced and friendly guy as he relaxes at the grand dinner table of his apartment on Manhattan's Upper West Side, reaching down occasionally to scratch the stomach of his enormous black labrador, Kirby, while his wife, Franni, taps at a computer in the kitchen.
Apparently, though, he is really a shrill and unstable parasite who often appears intoxicated or deranged, and whose views lack any insight or depth. That, at any rate, was the picture painted in court documents last month by Fox News, the hard-right American cable channel owned by Rupert Murdoch, as part of its effort to sue Franken for trademark infringement over the title of his new book, Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right. "Fair and balanced," improbably enough, is a slogan much used by the exuberantly biased Fox, which claimed that Franken - originally famous in the US as a performer on the comedy show Saturday Night Live - would "blur and tarnish" its reputation.
"You know how when people say someone was literally laughed out of court, they usually mean they were figuratively laughed out of court?" says Franken, 52, mixing evident satisfaction with a chuckle that sounds more like bewilderment. "They were literally laughed out of court."
Franken understands how to grab headlines - one of his earlier books, about the talk-radio controversialist Rush Limbaugh, carried the headline-grabbing title of Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot and Other Observations. And yet even Franken could not have concocted a better marketing stunt than the Fox lawsuit. Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them, a high-octane attack on dishonesty in both the rightwing media and the Bush administration, shot to the top of the New York Times's non-fiction bestseller list, where it remains.
Now it is being published in Britain, allowing UK readers to learn, for example, what happened when Franken wandered over to Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy US defence secretary, to express his view that the technological brilliance of the American military was primarily a result of the policies of Bill Clinton.
"Hi, Dr Wolfowitz," Franken said. "Hey, the Clinton military did a great job in Iraq, didn't it?" Wolfowitz, the man most involved in developing the new US doctrine of pre-emptive attack, evidently summoned his full arsenal of well-informed counter-arguments in order to compose his comeback. "Fuck you," he said. ("I'll get into all of this," Franken writes, "in a later chapter, entitled Yeah? Well, Fuck You.")
Among Franken's favourite targets is Ann Coulter, a ubiquitous face on the rightwing talkshow circuit, famous for her tirades against the supposedly ultra-liberal New York Times. (She apparently told one reporter that her "only regret" about Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber, was that "he did not go into the New York Times building".) Franken calls her recent bestseller, Slander: Liberal Lies about the American Right, "a fascinating exercise in dishonesty, hypocrisy, and irony of the unintentional sort."