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Fox Drops Suit, Kicks Franken
The lawsuit is over. The name-calling is forever.
Fox News, which lost a court round battle to tormentor Al Franken on Friday, surrendered the war on Monday, but not before lobbing some more choice words at the comic.
"It's time to return Al Franken to the obscurity that he's normally accustomed to," said Irena Steffen, spokeswoman for the "fair-and-balanced" network.
"See, they're class acts all the way," Franken cracked during an appearance Monday on Fox News rival CNN.
It was a dispute over the phrase "fair and balanced" that had Fox news squaring off against Franken in court.
The network sued Franken and his publisher two weeks ago, charging that the title of the Saturday Night Live alum's new book, Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right, infringed on Fox News' trademarked slogan, "fair and balanced."
The cable outlet sought damages and an injunction halting the book's publication. Dutton, a division of the Penguin Group, responded by rushing the satire into stores last week.
On Friday, a federal judge concluded the books could stay on shelves, rejecting Fox's lawsuit as "wholly without merit, both factually and legally."
Fox could have appealed the decision, but on Monday it announced it was dropping the lawsuit.
"The decision by Fox is welcome, if overdue," said Floyd Abrams, the attorney repping both Franken and Penguin, per reports. "The suit never should have been brought."
Fox argued that Franken's use of the phrase "fair and balanced," not to mention a small picture of Fox News host Bill O'Reilly, on the book's cover might lead Barnes & Noble browsers into thinking the tome was an authorized Fox News product.
For Barnes & Noble browsers who crack open the tome, there should be little doubt the tome is not an authorized product. Inside, Franken attacks O'Reilly, network boss Roger Ailes and "the entire Fox network," in the words of his publisher.
In its court filing, Fox News attacked Franken as a "shrill and unstable," "increasingly unfunny" "parasite."
For Franken, Monday's "obscurity" crack was snarkiness as usual. Fox "used the complaint to disparage me," he said on CNN.
In the end, Franken said, he was disappointed the lawsuit was dropped so quickly. With Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them Amazon.com's top-ranked title through Monday night, he said he was hoping the controversy would remain alive "for a few more news cycles."
Prior to being consigned into "obscurity" by Fox News, Franken shared in Emmy wins for writing for SNL, and authored the 1996 bestseller Rush Limbaugh Is a Big Fat Idiot: And Other Observations.
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