Fair and Balanced

Friday, August 15, is Fair and Balanced Friday on the Internet!

Quoth Neal Pollack:

The Fox News Channel has sued political satirist Al Franken to stop him from using the words "fair and balanced" in the title of his new book, scheduled to publish next month. The suit claims that the subtitle is "likely to cause confusion among the public about whether Fox News has authorized or endorsed the book and about whether Franken is affiliated with FNC." Good lord. Who among the five, possibly ten percent of the American people who could recognize Franken in a lineup would think that he's affiliated with the Fox News Channel? The man stands politically to the left of every major entertainment figure except Michael Moore and maybe Janeane Garofalo.

Atrios is a co-sponsor of Fair and Balanced Friday.

Nobody knows what the Fox News Channel's legal department was smoking prior to filing this bizarre lawsuit. In the comments on Making Light Mike Koslowski provides a link to an interview with Franken on Buzzflash in which Franken describes how rabidly Bill O'Reilly frothed when confronted on the air on a C-SPAN book-chat program about O'Reilly's lying claim that Inside Edition won two Peabody Awards. The speculation is that this lawsuit is a reflection of a vendatta of O'Reilly's against Franken.

In that same comment section, publishing lawyer C.E. Petit observes another sign of the strength of the Fox legal department's pipeweed:

Actually, Fox made a much, much bigger error in not waiting until 23 September to file suit. On 23 September, the mark will have been registered for five years, giving it "incontestable" status. Since they filed suit before that date, however, Penguin gets to attack the basis for even registering "fair and balanced" (in whatever symbology; the difference between and ampersand and "and" means very little). Sure, that would mean that the book is on the shelves, but it is still close enough in the future that it would be appropriate diligence in defending the mark.

Whether the use of the phrase "fair and balanced," a term of art in journalism and journalistic education, in the title Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right infringes on Fox News Channel's trademark is up to the court. Fox's, lawyers will report to the courtroom; a fair and balanced judge will decide.