I just finished reading Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right by Al Franken. I'll admit it, we wandered into a a Border's bookstore and there was the book, 30% off, piled up right next to the front door. I got suckered by an impulse buy, and all the hype of Fox trying to sue Franken for using their "fair and balanced" trademark in his cover.

This book is a hoot. Franken extensively quotes from various representatives of the "right wing media" (particularly Ann Coulter and Bill O'Rielly) and members of the G.W.Bush administration, where the things they say have virtually no correlation with any actual facts or studies, much less consistency with things they've said earlier. Franken occasionally goes into unnecessary tangents (particularly the chapter about "The Supply Side Jesus"), but most of the book is right on the money, and well worth the time to read it (I finished it all yesterday, the same day I bought it -- it's fairly light reading). This book began with a Franken appointment as a Harvard fellow, of some sort. He recruited 14 students to act as "TeamFranken", doing vast amounts of investigative work to dig up the real statistics relative to the make-believe numbers quoted by his targets.

Probably the most interesting section to me was where Franken discussed the untimely death and memorial services for Minnesota's former senator Paul Wellstone, who was apparently a close friend of Franken. Franken discusses how most of the negative commentary written about the memorial focuses on a few clips that aired on TV. Most of the commentators had not bothered to watch the full four hour ceremony before reaching their conclusions and spreading them widely. To some extent, it's press laziness, and to a greater extent, it's distortion of the truth. I've seen some of the same effects with various people, critical of our research on voting systems, dismissing our work without having actually read it because, well, they heard a biased summary of our work.

I've experenienced some of the things that Franken discusses in my own work, which only makes his book ring that much truer. It's a great read, and I encourage folks to check it out.