Franken Accuses Hume of "Obscene...Trivializing" of Troop Deaths

MRC ^ | Friday September 26, 2003 | BrentBaker

[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.

[dennisw]

Franken is trolling for indignant reactions that will sell his book

[dennisw]

Franken is trolling for indignant reactions that will sell his book

[Alamo-Girl]

Thanks for the heads up!

[RightOnline]

"What Hume said was not mean, just stupid and deceptive.

The left distorts like that all the time. Responsible journalists and commentators should not need to."

...and responsible conservatives should know whose version of the story to believe in this instance; that drooling moron Franken's, or that highly respected journalist, Brit Hume's.

[Steely Glint]

"Thanks, FRiends. Some days I need that."

Well, here's more. From one old sergeant to another, these are from my personal motivation file:

"Activate yourself to duty by remembering your position, who you are, and what you have obliged yourself to be." - Thomas à Kempis

"The liberal society has no use for its legions, as its prophets have long proclaimed. Except that in this world are tigers, tigers kept at bay only by legions ready to compete to the death with them." - T.R. Fehrenbach

"Fear God, and keep his commandments: for this is the whole duty of man." - Ecclesiastes 12:13.

"Be not diverted from your duty by any idle reflections the silly world may make upon you, for their censures are not in your power, and consequently should not be any part of your concern." - Epictetus

"The test of character is not 'hanging in there' when the light at the end of the tunnel is expected, but performance of duty and persistence of example when the situation rules out the possibility of the light ever coming." - Vice Admiral James Stockdale, USN

"It is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbled, or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes short again and again, who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, and spends himself in a worthy cause, who at best knows achievement and who at the worst if he fails at least fails while daring greatly so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat." - President Theodore Roosevelt

"Success is never final; failure is never fatal; it is the courage to continue that counts." - Prime Minister Sir Winston Churchill

"People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf." - George Orwell

"Some people spend an entire lifetime wondering if they made a difference. The Marines don't have that problem." - President Ronald Reagan

Personally, I always remember LCpl Jeffrey Nashton, a Marine who was nearly killed in the Beirut embassy bombing that also nearly killed my own best friend. Lying in a hospital bed in Weisbaden, West Germany, terribly wounded, blind, deaf, and with so many tubes running in and out of his body that people thought he looked more like a machine than a Marine, Nashton was visited by Marine Commandant General Paul X. Kelley, who was there to award LCpl Nashton the Purple Heart. Nashton felt the four stars on Kelley's shoulder with his fingers, realized it was the Commandant, and then motioned for a piece of paper and pen. With them he wrote a two-word note for Kelley that will live forever: "Semper Fi."

[syriacus]

As Franken says, there are 34 million people in California. There are more than 2,300 homicides each year in California, 6.6 a day

First of all, I am not a statistician, so I might be wrong in how I see this...but here goes

Franken calls Hume a liar, but doesn't do any better at answering the question that people really want answered.

Concerned people really want to know if the risk of death to the Americans in Iraq is really much worse than their risk of death if they stayed in the US.

Is Franken, say, comparing death rates per 100,000 among young people (especially men) in California, to death rates per 100,000 among young people serving in Iraq?

The ages of the Americans we choose to compare in Iraq and California should be similar.

So, for example, I think we should compare the chances of death (per 100,000)for, say, 18-21 year old men in the US and in Iraq. Then we should compare the chances of death per 100,000 for 18-21 year old women in the US and Iraq. Then the 21-25 year olds. The 26-30 year olds. And so on.

[syriacus]

Franken is trolling for indignant reactions that will sell his book

I agree. He is a pig for attention.

This publicity won't hurt his upcoming radio show, either.

[dixierose]

ping

[gg188]

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

Uh, yeah, Al, but all 34 million Californians are IN AMERICA and are Americans. So you might THINK that there should be fewer murders in AMERICA among AMERICANS than in a foreigh country full of ragheaded madmen with whom America is at war.

[Egregious Philbin]

Is Franken, say, comparing death rates per 100,000 among young people (especially men) in California, to death rates per 100,000 among young people serving in Iraq?

Franken was comparing nothing, he was commenting on Hume's bad comparison. Perhaps Hume should have come up with the better numbers you ask for in the first place.