Al Franken and the Lying Liars

By Scott Vogel, BuzzFlash. Posted June 13, 2003.

During a recent panel discussion on media bias at Book Expo America 2003, Al Franken called Bill O'Reilly on his lies -- and O'Reilly didn't take to it kindly. The heated exchange, which was covered by C-SPAN's Book TV, became the subject of media coverage around the nation. BuzzFlash interviewed Franken about his first round KO against O'Reilly -- and about the larger issue of the media's right-wing bias, which Franken covers in his new book, "Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right".

Author of the must-read "Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot," the audio version of which won a Grammy Award, Franken has also penned "Why Not Me? The Inside Story of the Making and Unmaking of the Franken Presidency" and "Oh, The Things I Know!," a satire on self-help books.

A 1973 graduate of Harvard, Franken performed stand-up comedy before joining Saturday Night Live. Between 1975 and 1980, Franken won five Emmy Awards, four for writing and one for producing. Franken returned to SNL for a 10-year run in 1985, during which time he created one of the SNL Hall of Fame characters, self-help guru Stuart Smalley.

On May 31, your appearance at a book exposition with co-panelists Molly Ivins and Bill O'Reilly was broadcast on C-SPAN's Book TV. At the event, you confronted O'Reilly about his lie that that he received the prestigious Peabody Award for his work as host of Inside Edition. Could you recap the story -- which is kind of funny when you think about it, lying about an award that honors outstanding achievement in broadcast journalism.

AL FRANKEN: Well, it isn't just that Bill O'Reilly claims he won a couple of Peabody Awards. Whenever he was asked about Inside Edition and it being sort of a tabloid show, O'Reilly would indignantly say that they had won two Peabody Awards. Who says we're a tabloid show? And O'Reilly would offer as proof the Peabody Awards that Inside Edition had supposedly won. And he did this on a number of occasions. I got through watching him once on C-SPAN and then went researching on Nexis. I just followed it up because I couldn't believe that Inside Edition had won a Peabody. And I did the research. And, of course, they hadn't won any Peabody Award. I thought I would call O'Reilly, and that way he could stop saying the wrong thing, which any journalist would be embarrassed about. Instead of being grateful that I had called him, he just got angry. Well it turns out that Inside Edition had won a "Polk" Award a year after he left. And so he got very, very angry and said, "Go ahead – go after me, Al." And so I just thought that it'd be fun to do.

I gave the story to Lloyd Grove at the Washington Post, who called O'Reilly. O'Reilly sort of said, "Well, all I did was mix up a Polk and a Peabody, and Al has this jihad against me," et cetera. Now that's not necessarily worth writing about, but then I discovered that about a week later Robert Reno at Newsday decided to do a column about the fact that O'Reilly had claimed on several occasions to have won Peabodies and hadn't.

O'Reilly then attacked Rob Reno in the most vitriolic way, saying, basically "I never said I won a Peabody. This is a total fabrication. The man's a liar," et cetera, et cetera. And that sort of seems pathological to me, or Bill O'Reilly just felt that he could get away with it. It's sort of emblematic of him.

So I thought that was the example of his lying that I could use at the Book Expo, because my book isn't about him. It's about the whole right-wing media, and how it affects the mainstream media. I also focus on Bush and his administration -- who do a lot of lying -- and how a right-wing media has allowed them to get away with a lot of stuff that, in a different media environment, they probably wouldn't be able to get away with.

Well, you bring up an interesting point, because it seems that one of the tactics of the right wing when they are confronted with the facts or proof of their lies, they just switch gears.

FRANKEN: O'Reilly kept saying during the C-SPAN event, and he kept repeating, "All I did was mix up up a Polk and a Peabody." But that's not the whole point of the story. When confronted with a lie, these guys just deny it.

You stated in your speech on C-SPAN that outside of the mainstream media,there's a well-funded, well-organized, right-wing media –- and you gestured to O'Reilly –- and that it acts as an echo chamber in the news, pushing the right-wing attacks, scandals and ideology. Could you elaborate on that idea of an echo chamber?

FRANKEN: Well, what certainly happened during the Clinton administration was that the American Spectator and the Washington Times and the Wall Street Journal would get these things that weren't true and print them. And, after awhile, they became such a part of the echo chamber that CNN and The New York Times and the L.A. Times felt they had to address those stories.

Because we live in a mass media culture, it seems that there's no such thing as any single story really causing that much of an impact. A news story has to be branded, and people have to keep talking about it. It's natural that the news cycle is going to turn very quickly, so even important stories get washed over.

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