Each day researchers involved with Media Matters for America, operators of mediamatters.org, watch, listen, and read the corporate media in order to monitor the content and identify "conservative misinformation" from the likes of Bill O'Reilly, Ann Coulter, Fox News, and other rightwing pundits and organizations. The effort is quite admirable--a host of writers contributing nearly up-to-the minute analysis of the latest conservative lies and corrections to the oft-fabricated information conservative pundits use to support their claims. Misstating the State of the Union is a product of this research as it collects rightwing distortions about the Clinton and Bush presidencies and uses them to reveal the larger rightwing biases of the corporate media.

Given its short length at only 146 pages, Misstating the State of the Union organizes a surprisingly large number of distortions by conservatives in the media into broad categories--social security, the environment, family values, the economy, and many more--using them as the basis for analyzing how conservatives present a view of the United States that is at odds with reality. These broad themes work well as it is easy to flip through the short book and understand that conservative position major issues on omnipresent in the US media. However, the organization within the chapters leaves much to be desired. Each chapter generally follows the same formula with subsections featuring quotes from conservative columnists and an explanation of how they are wrong, often citing one or two articles with opposing information. These subsections are written to refute a specific quote from a conservative, and frequently, to prove that the position of the Democratic Party and the Clinton administration is preferable to that of the Bush administration. As such, there is little systemic analysis and the book frequently functions as a simple Democratic Party rebuttal to the positions of Republicans presented daily in the media. There is no discussion of how conservatives get their message into the media; not once do the authors mention conservative public relations, media consolidation, or the networks of rightwing think-tanks and consulting firms.

While mediamatters.org is a useful resource, Misstating the State of the Union contributes relatively little to an understanding of how conservatives use the media and how the corporate media functions, instead reading like the Democratic opposition presented on shows such as Crossfire and Hannity and Colmes. Rather than delve into a more worthwhile analysis of how conservatives are able to use the media with such success, Misstating the State of the Union simply repeats their assertions and provides a couple of facts refuting each quote while claiming that things were better during the Clinton administration. The book is so partisan that in the brief sections of "analysis," the reader often encounters phrases straight out of John Kerry's presidential campaign speeches and petty insults--rather than a comprehensive and well-researched examination of how the conservative public relations system works. Readers seeking to understand how conservatives use the media should read Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber's Banana Republicans, as Misstating the State of the Union will provide them with little more than an almost endless litany of poorly reasoned arguments about why life was better during the Clinton administration than it is under Bush. Fans of Alan Colmes should take note of this book, but the rest of us should look elsewhere to understand the how conservatives use the media.