Salon Interviews Al Franken: They can dish it out, but they can't take it

Al Franken got the glad tidings while vacationing in Italy. He had fallen asleep reading "The Tipping Point" and mulling marketing ideas for his forthcoming "Lies, and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right," when a friend staying in the villa walked into his bedroom and woke him up. "Al!" he said. "You're being sued by Fox!" After a second-and-a-half of considering this, Franken responded: "Good!" Then he fell back asleep.

If Fox's intention was to break a large, undercooked ostrich egg on its corporate face while pouring streams of golden ducats into Franken's pockets, it carried out its plan to perfection. As everyone who pays attention to such matters knows by now, a judge laughed its copyright-infringement lawsuit (Fox claimed it trademarked the phrase "fair and balanced") out of court -- even adding insult to injury by warning the right-wing media behemoth that its ownership of the phrase it claimed to have spent $61 million developing was extremely dubious. And sales of Franken's book soared sky-high on the publicity, hitting #1 on Amazon's list Thursday.

All of which must have been bitter wormwood for the popular Fox talk-show host Bill O'Reilly, who many speculated was the moving force behind the now-dropped lawsuit after his notorious May 31 exchange with Franken at the Los Angeles Book Expo. Under Franken's tender ministrations, O'Reilly was reduced to sputtering "shut up!" and demanding that the gadfly comedian and writer remove O'Reilly's "splotchy" face off the cover of Franken's upcoming book.

For the man the Fox complaint called "shrill and unstable" and (somewhat unnecessarily, considering that charge) "not a well-respected voice in American politics," it was all in a day's work. Franken, who created the famously insipid Stuart Smalley character during his 15-year tenure at "Saturday Night Live" and has written four books, says driving conservatives off the deep end is easy. "O'Reilly keeps saying I'm a smear artist," he says, "but all I do is just say what they said...It's jujitsu. You just use what they do against them. And when you do that, they get mad."

more...

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2003/08/27/franken/index.html

Here's something interesting from the article:

Hey, whatever happened with that liberal radio show idea that Sheldon Drobny wanted you to do?

It's in the works. What they're trying to do is put together a network, and I would fit into that three hours a day. This is a very ambitious undertaking and they're progressing. I'm not at liberty to disclose everything that they're doing, but there's been progress, and chances are growing that this will happen and I'll be a part of it.

The problem is, with radio these days, if it's talk radio it's conservative talk radio. You can't put me on after Rush Limbaugh because it's like putting classic rock after hip-hop or something.

I would love to hear Al anchor a progressive radio network (along, with Molly Ivins, Jim Hightower, Mike Malloy, Guy James...)

as "obscure" as the Fox spokesperson says he is!