Oh, Really? No, O'Reilly…

The conventional wisdom, which is right around 50% of the time, is that Fox News filed its hopeless lawsuit against Al Franken's new book to appease the channel's biggest star, Bill O'Reilly.

So, apart from the fact that O'Reilly seems to despise Al Franken, why did he want the suit filed? A first year law student could have told him that the suit wouldn't survive five minutes in a court of law. (O'Reilly is also a passionate opponent of "frivolous lawsuits" that clog the courts, and has long advocated that folks who file them should have to pay all court costs. Somehow, I don't think Mr. Franken will be receiving a check…)

O'Reilly is more or less in the business of book promotion and publicity. He probably knew that the lawsuit would help usher in The Al Franken Decade (or some shorter period) on the Best Seller List. So why file this suit?

Perhaps the answer can be found in this opinion piece that O'Reilly just wrote. It's about that old interview of Arnold Schwarzenegger that has surfaced to embarrass him. O'Reilly allows that dredging it up is to be expected but doesn't think it's fair. On his show, he turned this topic into a tirade against the Internet and he's right, of course, that a lot of nonsense and slander and gossip does get disseminated via the World Wide Web, but he's wasting his time pointing that out. No one thinks the Internet isn't a repository for inaccurate info, and that's just how it's going to be. All the O'Reilly editorials in the world will do zero to change that.

What he misses is that the Internet has an accurate, archival function, as well. I'm not a regular watcher of Mr. O'Reilly but when I've seen him, it seems like nothing makes him madder than having his own words and seeming contradictions thrown back at him. That's one thing the Internet is great at. The example I cited a moment ago about frivolous lawsuits came off a couple of websites that quoted the Fox News host condemning precisely the kind of action his employer attempted, allegedly at his urging. When O'Reilly yells "shut up," as he often does, it frequently seems to be because someone is attempting to quote something he said and wishes to forget. That was pretty much what his public squabble with Franken was about. Franken was quoting not only times O'Reilly said things that were untrue but times he denied he'd said them at all. For a guy in Bill's line of work, the latter is probably more embarrassing than the former.

O'Reilly is absolutely right that some good people don't choose to stand for public office because they know someone is going to haul out an interview they gave in 1977 or some ancient incident that now seems embarrassing. Somehow, I doubt he'll feel that way the next time Fox News has something damaging to a Democrat, but we'll see. Either way, he's right and the practice is not going away. There will never be a Statute of Limitations on releasing or leaking something damaging about a political opponent…and even if a given politician chooses not to throw mud, the tabloids, as well as websites like Drudge Report and The Smoking Gun, will get it out there. (Actually, with the rise of such sites, politicians don't have to leak smears about their opposition. Whether they like it or not, it will get done for them. Arnold's backers are trying to gain some traction by charging that the release of the old interview was a smear tactic by Democrats. But the actual path of that material into the public discourse is not at all a mystery and could easily have occurred without partisan prodding.)

O'Reilly should know that digging up dirt is here to stay for as long as there's a vote to be won or a buck to be made. What I suspect has him frothing about the Franken book is not that it may be filled with slander, as we define it, but that it's full of old O'Reilly quotes, which one can easily glean from the Internet, Nexis/Lexis and even the Fox News website. And you can't tell a book to "Shut up! Just shut up!" Fox News tried that and it didn't work.