Word: frankener
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...with the proliferation of media, Americans don't even have to listen anymore to anyone who doesn't agree with them. There's talk radio and cable and Truebeliever.com to reinforce and inflame their views rather than challenge them. At the bookstore, Ann Coulter and Al Franken square off on the best-seller table (see box). The hordes of media shouters both mirror the electorate and harden their outlook. Moderation may be sensible and practical, but it's not entertaining, and it doesn't sell books...
...starters, they--the universal epithet--are liars. Besides Franken, David Corn holds forth for 337 pages on The Lies of George W. Bush; Coulter followed Slander: Liberal Lies About the American Right with Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism. They are also elitists and exclusionary. Writes Ingraham in Shut Up & Sing, liberal elites "think where we live--anywhere but near or in a few major cities--is stupid." (Ingraham, says her "About the Author" note, "lives in the Washington area.") They control the media--notwithstanding the best seller you are holding...
...substance. They're less interested in convincing anyone--though Moore offers a limp chapter, "How to Talk to Your Conservative Brother-in-Law"--than in whipping up their own berserkers. At heart, the anger business is show business, which is why it's been so kind to comics like Franken and showmen like Limbaugh. "What you have," says Publishers Weekly editor Steven Zeitchik, "is the marrying of the interest in political books with the culture of celebrity." Even the noncomedians in the bunch use the tropes of comedy and show biz: sarcasm, hyperbole and shock. Britney kissing Madonna, Coulter saying...
...paid for my purchases, but the security gate at Barnes & Noble was squealing anyway. The problem was Al Franken's Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right. The cashier had not deactivated its anti-theft insert, but I couldn't help wondering if the book was screeching at being trapped in the same bag with liberal-bias critic Bernard Goldberg's best seller Arrogance: Rescuing America from the Media Elite. (One Franken chapter is titled "I Bitch-Slap Bernie Goldberg.") "Let me desensitize Mr. Franken for you," the guard said...
...afraid scientists have not invented a machine capable of desensitizing Mr. Franken. Nor Bill O'Reilly, Michael Moore, Ann Coulter, Molly Ivins, Laura Ingraham and the rest of the authors and TV and radio hosts divided by beliefs but united by a common employer: the burgeoning American anger industry. It's a multimedia platform--TV and radio shows stoking book sales and vice versa--that grew strong through the '90s with the rise of Rush Limbaugh and the conservative-publishing boom. But the monologue has become--O.K., not a dialogue, but at least two angry monologues, as liberals have discovered...