Oh look! Some of Ann Coulter's lies!
decaturdailydemocrat.com
Ann Coulter's Vaseline-covered close-up
By GENE LYONS Wednesday, May 4, 2005 11:52 AM CDT
The idea of "liberal media bias" has long been the most useful propaganda tool of the Republican right.
For believers, it's a magical balm rendering invisible all inconvenient facts. Did it first appear in, say, The New York Times or on network television? Then it's a lie concocted by elitists who think they're better than you.
Nobody peddles this line more consistently than Ann Coulter, the ubiquitous GOP attack-blonde, so you'd expect that when Time magazine recently named her one of the world's 100 "most influential" people, then made her its April 25 cover girl, things would get ugly.
After all, this is a woman who once publicly wished that Timothy McVeigh had set off a truck bomb at The New York Times; who routinely calls Democrats "traitors" and urges U.S. troops in Iraq to shoot journalists; and called for John Walker Lindh to be executed to teach "liberals" they, too, can be killed.
Almost needless to say, Time's profile was a puff piece. Doing interviews in expensive Manhattan restaurants, author John Cloud made it sound like the two were dating. If somewhat unkindly depicting Coulter as a heavy drinker whose breath smelled of Nicorette, Time also reported that college boys are turned on by "her hard-charging righteousness and willowy, sex-kitten pulchritude."
Well, one man's sex kitten is another man's scarecrow. But once a news-mag decides to make a "controversial" celebrity profile its cover story - and I've written them - it's going to "balance" every negative comment with a positive appraisal like one-time Bush judicial appointee Miguel Estrada's, who finds her "lively and funny and engaging and boisterous and outrageous."
Editors will then move heaven and earth to provide an upbeat ending. In Coulter's case, Time says American political "punditry would be so much duller without her humor and fire," assuring us that "on TV or in person, you can trust that Coulter will speak from her heart." It's the news-mag equivalent of smearing Vaseline on a camera lens to blur the wrinkles away. But the bit that really annoyed Coulter's critics was author Cloud's bland assurance that she "has a reputation for carelessness with facts, and if you Google the words 'Ann Coulter lies,' you will drown in results. But I didn't find many outright Coulter errors."
How hard did he look? Coulter herself admitted a single "mistake" to Time's scribe. On the last page of her best-selling book "Slander" (Three Rivers Press, 2003) she'd charged that The New York Times failed to report the death of NASCAR hero Dale Earnhardt on its front page. This supposedly proved liberals are "savagely cruel bigots who hate ordinary Americans and lie for sport."
In fact, as Bob Somerby's brilliantly iconoclastic Web site The Daily Howler first documented, along with scores of other Coulter "mistakes," Earnhardt's death was marked by two highly sympathetic front-page stories in the Times.
Seeing Coulter's accuracy praised sent Somerby to work on another suspect passage from "Slander." Here's the entire paragraph as it appears in her book:
"After Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas wrote an opinion contrary to the clearly expressed position of the New York Times editorial page, the Times responded with an editorial on Thomas titled 'The Youngest, Cruelest Justice.' That was actually the headline on a lead editorial in the Newspaper of Record. Thomas is not engaged on the substance of his judicial philosophy. He is called 'a colored lawn jockey for conservative white interests,' 'race traitor,' 'black snake,' 'chicken-and-biscuit-eating Uncle Tom,' 'house Negro' and 'handkerchief head,' 'Benedict Arnold' and 'Judas Iscariot.'"
Now anybody who's read three New York Times editorials, as Coulter's defrauded readers clearly have not, would realize immediately that such racial slurs never appeared there. (Notice the cunning use of the passive voice: Thomas "is called.") Indeed, some reviewers noticed that Coulter's footnotes led readers elsewhere. Somerby tracked them down. Guess what? The offensive phrases didn't appear in those places, either.
His curiosity piqued, Somerby ran a Nexis search. He found the offensive phrases word-for-word in an agitprop-style Washington Times book review of "We Won't Go Back: Making the Case for Affirmative Action" by Charles Lawrence and Mari Matsuda (Houghton Mifflin, 1997). Washington Times is the right-wing newspaper heavily subsidized by Korean cult leader Sun Myung Moon. It appeared that our willowy sex kitten had simply lifted a couple of sentences, misattributed them, then concocted bogus footnotes.
With some experience of The Washington Times, I phoned Somerby and suggested that he take his research a step further. And guess what? It turns out that Lawrence and Matsuda, the Georgetown University law professors whose book was being reviewed, protested having slurs they'd called hateful bigotry put in their mouths.
It's all make-believe. Every word of it.
But straight from the heart.
Arkansas Democrat-Gazette columnist Gene Lyons is a national magazine award winner.
and co-author of "The Hunting of the President" (St. Martin's Press, 2000).
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