Book Review: Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them by Al Franken
I actually listened to this book on audio CD about a month ago. It wasn’t abridged, however, and it was read by the author, so I don’t think I missed out on anything. In fact, since he was able to convey his intended tone, I may have actually appreciated it better than if I had read it. It is a great book because it is funny and sad. It is like watching The Daily Show. You really feel that both Jon Stewart and Al Franken use humor to try to make the world a better place, because otherwise they would just be helpless (like the rest of us). Anyway, Franken (unlike Stewart) is unabashedly partisan as a registered Democrat. He doesn’t really focus his ire on Republicans per se, however. Rather, Franken’s book is primarily about the (in his view) incorrect conventional wisdom that the media has a liberal bias. In the first half of the book he makes a good case for this. Not that the rest of the book contradicts this, but rather it just deals with different topics. He used a research team of students at Harvard University to put together a set of statistics regarding the 2000 presidential election that supports his concept pretty well that what the media cares about is hype. Franken says that during the leadup to the 2000 election that the media reported positively about Bush overwhelmingly in comparison to Gore. The basic premise: that everyone was already bored of Gore (Issues? Nobody cares about issues!) and Bush was fresh and interesting territory.
Franken also talks about the reality of media talk shows and how the right-wing is overrepresented with Bill O’Reilly, Rush Limbaugh, et al. He doesn’t say much about Limbaugh, as he has an entirely separate book dedicated to that guy, but he does take apart O’Reilly, Ann Coulter and Sean Hannity pretty well. He seems to view O’Reilly as some sort of freak that is amusing to watch, and he openly despises Coulter, but he saves his really vicious stuff for Hannity.
Anyway, it’s quite enjoyable for the type of people who love the Daily Show, but people like my dad will hate it.
Keep an eye out for the bit about Bob Jones University. Good stuff.