Posted on 09/26/2003 1:24:11 PM PDT by fight_truth_decay
Left-wing ranter Al Franken, on Thursday's The View on ABC, maintained that in contrast to how "I love our troops," he charged that FNC's Brit Hume is "trivializing the danger that our soldiers are under" in Iraq and claimed of a news item Hume read in late August: "It's obscene and it's offensive to those troops and their families."
Franken's allegation, based on misquoting, distorting and misrepresenting what Hume actually said and meant, came as he defended his mean-spirited, vulgar tirade against Hume and FNC which he leveled during a Howard Dean fundraising event last Saturday.
On FNC's O'Reilly Factor on Monday night, Bill O'Reilly showed a clip of Franken on stage at the Saturday, September 20 event in New York City, in front of a big "Dean for America" sign. The clip joined Franken mid-rant, and though FNC bleeped out the vulgarities, it was pretty clear what Franken was saying. But instead on listing the actual word, or putting in a bunch of asterisks, I thought I'd try something new, a bit of simple encryption I've seen employed by Michael Z. McIntee, Editor of the Late Show's online Wahoo Gazette, to avoid publishing offensive words: Look one letter to the left on your keyboard. So, with that code in mind, here's Franken on Hume and FNC:
"-How big an asshole Brit Hume is and how shameless, how givlomh shameless these people are. These people are so givlomh shameless. They are shameless. And I don't just say this because the Fox people sued me."
Appearing on the September 25 The View to promote his book, Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right, Franken was asked to explain his anti-FNC outburst.
Franken contended: "I am about, at Christmas, to go on my fourth USO tour. I'm going to Afghanistan and Iraq. I love our troops. I've been to Kosovo three times, went to Bosnia three times. What I was responding to was Brit Hume went on his show, Special Report, and he said this, he said this about our troops, he says: 'Statistically speaking, U.S. soldiers have less of a chance of dying in Iraq than citizens have of being murdered in California.'"
View quad-host Joy Behar interjected: "Nasty."
Franken picked up: "And this is, and then his evidence was there are about 6.6 homicides a day in California and we're losing only 1.7 soldiers a day in Iraq. Now what he's forgetting is there are 34 million people living in California and there are one point, and there are 140,000, so you're actually 60 times more likely to die if you're a soldier in Iraq.
"And so what he was doing, the point of this was, that Fox News, and this is what I talk about in my book, is a shill for this administration and they were trying to say, 'oh, it's not so bad in Iraq. Everything's under control in Iraq and our soldiers really are' -- and anyone who's trivializing the danger that our soldiers are under there, and for every soldier that gets killed ten get wounded, for anyone who trivializes that, I think that's obscene. And I'm sorry, I don't apologize if, I don't apologize for getting angry at someone who trivializes the danger that our troops are under and that's why I'm going at Christmas and I just think that it's obscene and it's offensive to those troops and their families."
Franken quoted Hume as reporting: "Statistically speaking, U.S. soldiers have less of a chance of dying in Iraq than citizens have of being murdered in California." But for a guy so concerned about accuracy, he misstated what Hume said, though the difference did not change Hume's meaning in a significant way.
Hume stated on his August 26 show: "Statistically speaking, U.S. soldiers have less of a chance of dying from all causes in Iraq than citizens have of being murdered in California which is roughly the same geographical size."
But in order to impugn Hume as some kind of monster mocking the deaths of soldiers in Iraq, Franken clearly distorted and misrepresented Hume's point. Hume's statistical contrast may not match up on the risk of death for a U.S. soldier in Iraq versus a citizen in California, but that was not his point. He was making an observation about media priorities. Hume was trying to contrast the raw number of murders occurring in the two places in order to make a point about excessive media focus on the casualty rate in Iraq as being inordinately high and newsworthy above all other developments -- along the theme of how the media will ignore a thousand people killed during a year in car accidents one or two at a time in a metropolitan area, but then go wall-to-wall when a plane crash kills 40 people -- only in this case the media were focusing on the daily deaths and not putting them into a larger context of how many more go unnoticed when murdered in a U.S. state that is not perceived as particularly dangerous.
Here, in full, is Hume's August 26 "Grapevine" segment item on Special Report with Brit Hume:
"Two hundred seventy seven U.S. soldiers have now died in Iraq, which means that, statistically speaking, U.S. soldiers have less of a chance of dying from all causes in Iraq than citizens have of being murdered in California which is roughly the same geographical size. The most recent statistics indicate California has more than 2,300 homicides each year, which means about 6.6 murders each day. Meanwhile, U.S. troops have been in Iraq for 160 days, which means they're incurring about 1.7 deaths, including illness and accidents, each day."
Even if you somehow believe that this one short item represents some kind of terrible bias, it pales compared to the regular onslaught of liberal bias delivered night after night and morning after morning by ABC, CBS, CNN and NBC and yet the MRC has never resorted to yelling about how Dan Rather or Peter Jennings or Matt Lauer or Aaron Brown are "givlomh shameless" or to distort their real bias into a ridiculous accusation about any of them making fun of people being murdered.
Franken's media analysis is pretty pathetic.
BUZZFLASH's interview (while promoting Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right) with Franken moved from O'Reilly to Hannity on his list of FoxNews media bias attacks back on June 12, 2003. Preceding his opinion of Hannity, Franken said this of the "right-wing media..right-wing bias.." their agenda is: "we're an adjunct of the Republican Party, and we're going push that agenda every day, and, as you say, brand these stories that help further the right-wing cause."
Franken: "If you watched Hannity and Colmes during the war, it was hilarious. Hannity would, every day, be saying that Democrats were undermining the President by criticizing the Commander in Chief with criticisms that were so either nonexistent or mild. Whereas, Hannity, if you went back and looked at what he was saying during Kosovo, was attacking Clinton in the harshest terms every day. Hannity deliberately meant to undermine Clinton by saying he's not following his advisors, we're running out of ammunition, he doesn't know what he's doing. He was allowing guests to come on and say this is the worst planned military operation in history, and he'd nod, and say, "Um-hmm."
Franken is admitted by BuzzFlash to be one of its' heroes.
This is the left's primary propoganda tool.
Their bellies have been stroked since September 12th, and they've been lulled back to sleep.
They've been told to forget 9/11 ever happened, Bush is a Nazi/illegal Pres/drunken idiot, and Hollywood is more important to their happy lives.
Someone tell me, why do I keep doing the job I do?
Franken is a stooge, a mouthpiece.
He will be deployed more in 2004. Interesting way to get around campaign financing laws.
Also to be deployed is Michael Moore, demo money funding the movie, and timing, of the probable release of a film "9/11" just before the election.
I'll bet he's a real headliner. I'm suprised and disgusted that the USO would even consider booking this nutjob.
[Al, not you personally]
I saw the segment in question, and I didn't find it either stupid or deceptive. Hume's point was that the mainstream media ceaselessly pronounces the deaths in Iraq as if whole battalions, brigades, and divisions were dying. For perspective, he contrasted the numbers with California's.
The quote doesn't look great when taken completely out of context, but was valid within his context, IMO.
I stopped reading when I got to this. What the F is a "givlomh"? Sounds like a disease of some sort.
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