A book cataloguing the right-wing bias in broadcasts by Rupert Murdoch’s US cable television news network, Fox News, has topped the American bestseller lists, weeks after lawyers acting for the company tried to stop it being published.
Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them; A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right, by comedian Al Franken, has sold more than 300 000 copies after being rushed into the shops to capitalise on a failed legal attempt by Fox News to claim the book’s title was an infringement of its slogan, ‘fair and balanced’.
The lawsuit was dismissed by a US district court judge last month as ‘wholly without merit, both factually and legally’ but the headlines attracted by the case have been enough to keep Franken at the top of the New York Times bestsellers list for the past three weeks. ‘I would just like to thank Fox for filing the stupidest legal briefs I have ever seen in my life’, Franken said.
The book’s success marks the latest stage in the feud between Franken – a life-long Democrat who made his name as a writer for Saturday Night Live , the country’s most popular satirical show — and Bill O’Reilly, the right-wing host of Fox News’s top-rated show. O’Reilly’s photograph is featured on the book’s cover.
The two men almost came to blows at the US publishing industry’s annual book fair, BookExpo, earlier this year after Franken publicly exposed a number of inaccuracies made on air by O’Reilly, including his claim to have won a Peabody Award – the most prestigious award in American broadcast journalism. Franken’s account of the now infamous confrontation is published in his book under the chapter heading ‘Bill O’Reilly: Lying, Splotchy Bully’.
O’Reilly said: ‘There is a movement among the ultraleft to discredit me and Fox News any way they can. They can’t win the ratings war, they can’t win the debate, so they turn to defamation.’
The success of the book follows that of Michael Moore’s Stupid White Men, an attack on the Bush administration which topped the bestseller lists last year. Like Moore, Franken is scathing about the White House but his greatest scorn is reserved for those who argue that there is a liberal bias within the US media.
‘The members of the right-wing media are not interested in portraying the truth. That’s not what they’re for. They are an indispensable component of the right-wing machine that’s taken over our country,’ he writes in the book. – Guardian Unlimited Â