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Fri. Aug 15, 2003

A Fair and Balanced Day

A Fair and Balanced Day – The Fox News lawsuit against Al Franken has had a far greater impact than their lawyers ever dreamed. Just not the impact they intended.

For example, today across hundreds of weblogs, it’s a Fair and Balanced Day. A day to use three simple words in as many ways as possible, and have them all indexed by Google, just to poke at Fox’s litigious ways.

It’s working, too. When I wrote Fair, Balanced and Litigious on Tuesday, a this entry of mine was listed on page three of the returns, but today, I’ve been bumped to page eight. That’s a lot of new “trademark infringement” in such a short time, isn’t it?

All inspired solely by Fox’s action. What else has this lawsuit accomplished? The book they are trying to stop has jumped to #1 in orders on Amazon. Solely because of Fox’s action.

In fact, the very language of the suit itself has been described by a respected law professor as sounding “like a snit fit.” Having read the full text of the suit, I’d describe it as 20 pages of hot air converted to PDF form. As the icing on the cake, in the PDF, for whatever reason, all the pages are tilted … to the right.

I am somehow reminded of the Roadrunner cartoons in which the Coyote was always getting crushed by his own hair-brained creations. This one is so perfect it might have been a covert op by CNN. Fox is left looking transparently petty, thin-skinned, vindictive, and just plain foolish.

And they did it all by themselves. That’s as fair and balanced as it gets.