2. Conservative Books and "Studies" Alleging "Liberal Bias"

2.5 BOOK: "Slander: Liberal Lies About the American Right" by Ann Coulter

Like many other books of the same genre from the Far Right, "Slander" competes with the best works of (vile) fiction. Knowing Coulter's history of pathological dishonesty and unsurpassed fraud, it must be said that anyone who took this book seriously for even a fraction of a second deserves to be thought of as not credible (and that includes many mainstream media "book critics" who laughably touted her "footnotes", without checking to see if the footnotes and claims were actually accurate! Some liberal media, that!).

Before I cover the book itself, let me make a relevant point. The very fact that Ann Coulter remains highly "successful" and gets repeated invitations to "mainstream media" talk shows (especially Fox News) clearly argues against the "liberal media" myth. Indeed, it points to the opposite. One can never imagine anyone on the left who is even remotely in her category being invited again and again to such talk shows despite a history of almost unprecedented fraud and demonstrated bigotry and hatred. In many respects, it would seem that Ann Coulter's career alone would allow me to rest my case - that the U.S. has an illiberal, conservative media (ICM).

Talking of the book, reviewers that have taken even a slight amount of time to randomly check on the "facts" in "Slander", have shown that the book is completely littered with false claims and statements; it is probably impossible to fully show the reader what a piece of work this book is without writing an entire book on it. But I will feature some of the reviews here.

Let's start with the review done by The American Prospect's TAPPED.

Herewith, compiled, are Tapped's fact-checks of Ann Coulter:

Chapter 1: In which we announce the plan to fact check Coulter, and catch her on Jim Jeffords' voting record; Chapter 2: In which we discover that she needs to get a calendar; Chapter 3: In which she spouts off (embarrassingly) on Hardball; Chapter 4: In which she viciously abuses LexisNexis (not for the last time!); Chapter 5: In which she repeats the Gore Love Story howler; Chapter 6: In which she abuses LexisNexis once again; Chapter 7: In which we show that Coulter's wrong about whether liberal women get called "ugly"; Chapter 8: In which Coulter misrepresents the end of the Cold War; Chapter 9: In which she lies about how "nobody" covered an Al Gore gaffe during a campaign stop in Monticello.

...Chapter 1

...Tapped reader U.R. reports that one chapter into Coulter's book -- "I only managed to get through the first chapter," he writes, because "I can't read the book more than a few minutes at a time" -- he's already found two obvious factual errors. On page 7, Coulter writes that Jim Jeffords "opposed Reagan's tax cut, supported the elder Bush's tax hike, supported Clinton's tax hike, and opposed the younger Bush's tax cut." She's right about the first two. But we checked, and Jeffords -- like all Republicans at the time -- voted against Clinton's 1993 budget (which included the tax hike) and for George W. Bush's recent tax cut. The latter is a pretty glaring error, both because it was so recent and because Jeffords' refusal to oppose the cut was a major blow to liberals who thought his party switch would help them defeat it.

(On the same page, Coulter also writes that Jeffords "voted against Clinton's impeachment" -- which is impossible, as the Senate never voted on impeachment. The House has the power to impeach; the Senate only votes on whether or not to convict. Jeffords did, however, vote against conviction. So maybe we're quibbling.)

If Coulter is going to title her book Slander, it would be nice if she would also go to the trouble of proofreading it. But maybe she didn't have time.

...Chapter 4

...On page 15 of Slander, she writes: "In the New York Times archives, 'moderate Republican' has been used 168 times...There have been only 11 sightings of a 'liberal Republican.'" Coulter does not footnote her methodology in "discovering" this nugget, but we checked using both the Times's own free search page and Lexis-Nexis. Our results? Our Times search reveals twenty-two hits for "liberal Republican" since 1996 -- that is, in just the last seven years. For Lexis, we searched for "liberal Republican" in The New York Times over "all available dates" -- and got 524 documents. Coulter's claim is obviously false. But stay tuned -- Tapped spent all weekend reading Slander and there's lots more to come.

...Chapter 5

...Coulter eeks out impressive mileage from Gore's supposed lie about having been "the inspiration" for Love Story, Erich Segal's 1970 bestselling-romance-novel-turned-Oscar-nominated-film. She refers to the alleged Love Story lie a whopping four times in Slander -- on pages 145, 154, 159, and 160. But this one has been debunked by Eric Boehlert in Salon, Bob Somersby in the Daily Howler, Robert Parry in The Washington Monthly, and Sean Wilentz in TAP.

The truth is that Gore was the inspiration for the book's hero, Oliver Barrett IV, according to Segal. Segal's reported "denial" of Gore's claim was no denial at all. Speaking to the New York Times's Melinda Henneberger for a follow-up story, Segal said that Oliver Barrett was based on Gore and his Harvard roommate, actor Tommy Lee Jones. He only denied that the female lead, the fiery musician Jenny Cavilleri, was based on Tipper Gore. And even that wrong detail was not Gore's mistake.

What actually happened? On a late-night plane ride in late 1997, shooting the breeze with Time's Karen Tumulty and the Times's Rick Berke, Gore mentioned that the main characters in Love Story were based on him and Tipper. At any rate, Gore said, that's what Segal had told the Nashville Tennessean years ago on his book tour. Segal met Gore and Jones when they were students at Harvard together and Gore was dating Tipper, then a student at Boston University. Tumulty reported this comment in Time but neglected to include in her story the fact that Gore had said explicitly that his only source on Love Story was what the Tennessean had reported some seventeen years prior. But the Tennessean, it turned out, has misquoted Segal, who had said nothing about Tipper.

In Henneberger's follow-up, Segal himself defended Gore: "Al attributed it to the newspaper...They conveniently omitted that part. Time thought it was more piquant to leave that out."

So did Coulter.

...Chapter 6

...Live by LexisNexis, die by LexisNexis. That certainly seems to be the case with Ann Coulter's latest book, Slander. Yesterday we exposed a blatantly false statement in her book about the use of the phrase "liberal Republican" in the New York Times, and today we expose another. Here is the relevant passage, from p. 199 of Slander:

Since abortion is not the left's proudest moment, liberals prefer to keep reminiscing about the last time they were giddily self-righteous. Like a senile old man who keeps telling you the same story over and over again, liberals babble on and on about the "heady" days of civil rights marches. Between 1995 and 2001, the New York Times alone ran more than one hundred articles on "Selma" alone. I believe we may have revisited this triumph of theirs sufficiently by now. For anyone under fifty, the "heady" days of civil rights marches are something out of a history book. The march on Selma was thirty-five years ago.

Tapped smelled a rat here. Maybe it was Coulter's repetition of the word "alone"; or maybe it was the fact that the famous 1965 "Bloody Sunday" march was from Selma to Montgomery, not a march "on" Selma. So we searched the New York Times archives on LexisNexis for the word "Selma" for the years 1995-2001. This produced 776 total hits. Of these, 424 were death notices, 18 were wedding announcements, 25 were other sorts of paid notices, 5 were in photo captions, and 234 were either: a) contents listings; b) people with the name Selma; c) references to Selma, California; or d) references to Selma, Alabama that had nothing to do with civil rights (b, c, and d includes letters and op-eds as well as regular articles). Of the remaining 70 items, in our judgment only 16 were centrally concerned with historic happenings at Selma from the civil rights era. The other 54 contained brief mentions of Selma and civil rights but appeared in articles on different topics. Once again, Coulter's dubious claim -- that "between 1995 and 2001, the New York Times alone ran more than one hundred articles on 'Selma'" -- is false.

...Chapter 9

...On page 139 of her new book, Slander -- now a bestseller -- Ann Coulter describes how cruelly the media treated George W. Bush during the election. By contrast, she reports:

[T]he press maintained radio silence on stories embarrassing to Gore. For example, … Al Gore couldn't pick George Washington out of a lineup. In a highly publicized stop at Monticello during Clinton's 1993 inaugural festivities, Gore pointed to carvings of Washington and Benjamin Franklin and asked the curator: 'Who are these guys?' He was surrounded by reporters and TV cameras when he said it. Only one newspaper, USA Today, reported the incident.

Coulter isn't wrong if, by "only one newspaper," she actually means "dozens of newspapers." In the immediate aftermath of the incident, references to Gore's gaffe appeared in USA Today, Newsday, The Washington Times, London's Evening Standard, and, the coup de grace, two articles in Coulter's favorite bulwark of liberal bias, The New York Times. The Associated Press also ran a story with the incident in its headline, so many local papers probably picked it up.

But wait! There's more! The authors of one of the New York Times articles were none other than Maureen Dowd and Frank Rich, two of Coulter's most reliable liberal scapegoats, who were both reporters in 1993 when the incident occurred. If these two are co-leaders of the vast, left-wing conspiracy, they sure dropped the ball.

Had enough of the love? We're still not done yet because …Coulter also misquoted Gore! His actual words were "Who are these people?" not "Who are these guys?" It's a small error, but it obviously makes Gore sound more disrespectful of the founding fathers, and even the USA Today article Coulter did find got the quotation right.

As always we defer to the incomparable Bob Somerby of the Daily Howler, for more.

Let's start here:

CAR WRECK: Some of you think we’re carefully picking our topics when we write about Slander. Sorry. We fact-checked pages one and two because that’s where a book begins (TDH, 7/11). We checked the Katie Couric flap because it became a big flap. We fact-checked Coulter’s section on Schlafly due to Maslin’s review in the Times. But frankly, we haven’t checked any part of this book without encountering instant problems. We’d be surprised if there’s any part of this book where basic “facts” haven’t just been made up.

So yesterday, we got a grand idea. We fact-checked Coulter’s final page—and you can, of course, guess what happened.

Coulter closes with a screed against the New York Times. “[L]iberals have absolutely no contact with the society they decry from their Park Avenue redoubts,” she stupidly fumes. Then, her penultimate paragraph:

COULTER (page 205): The day after seven-time NASCAR Winston Cup champion Dale Earnhardt died in a race at the Daytona 500, almost every newspaper in America carried the story on the front page. Stock-car racing had been the nation’s fastest-growing sport for a decade, and NASCAR the second-most-watched sport behind the NFL. More Americans recognize the name Dale Earnhardt than, say, Maureen Dowd. (Manhattan liberals are dumbly blinking at that last sentence.) It took the New York Times two days to deem Earnhardt’s name sufficiently important to mention it on the first page. Demonstrating the left’s renowned populist touch, the article began, “His death brought a silence to the Wal-Mart.” The Times went on to report that in vast swaths of the country people watch stock-car racing. Tacky people were mourning Dale Earnhardt all over the South!

Typical, nasty, ugly, mean stuff. For the record, Earnhardt died on Sunday, February 18, 2001. And Coulter is right about one thing. The next day, February 19, “almost every newspaper in America carried the story on the front page.”

Coulter is right about something else, too—the New York Times piece to which she refers appeared on February 21. It was written by major star Rick Bragg, a down-home boy from the South. (When Bragg won a Pulitzer in 1996, the Times notice said, “Rick Bragg, 36, a native of Piedmont, Ala., has long said his life’s ambition was to write about the South.”) On this occasion, Bragg was writing from Earnhardt’s hometown; his piece began in the local Wal-Mart because, on the day of the NASCAR crash, residents bought every last bit of the store’s Earnhardt memorabilia. As Bragg explained what happened next, the tone of his piece became clear:

BRAGG (page one, 2/21/01): Today, it was clear what had become of some of it all: People had written their love on shirts and toys, and hung or propped them on a fence outside the offices of Dale Earnhardt Inc., one of the fanciest buildings in town. By morning, the makeshift memorial stretched 40 yards, and cars lined the country road.

“You were God to me,” a mourner scribbled on a card. Another wrote, “My boyfriend’s daddy loved you dearly.”

To the world outside Mooresville and the other little towns around this red-clay corner of North Carolina, Dale Earnhardt might have been racing’s biggest superstar, a walking corporation who won millions in prizes and millions more through smart marketing of his fame. He may have been the force behind the sport’s rise to nationwide popularity, after greats like Richard Petty had faded from victory lane.

But before he was “theirs,” as people here like to say, he was “ours.”

Bragg is hardly a foppish “northeast liberal.” But what did Coulter tell her readers? According to Coulter, Bragg had said that “tacky people were mourning Dale Earnhardt all over the South.” Her nasty comment reveals the sick heart which informs her rank, bile-induced volume.

But forget about the tone of Bragg’s piece; Coulter made a stronger point in that penultimate paragraph. She complained about the way the Times had supposedly ignored Earnhardt’s death altogether. Everyone else treated Earnhardt’s death as a page one story the day it occurred. Coulter’s question: Why, oh why, did the great New York Times wait two more days to put Dale on its cover?

We suspect you know the answer to that; Coulter was inventing. (Again!) In fact, the Times did run the story of Earnhardt’s death on its front page on Monday, February 19. (NEXIS makes this perfectly clear. Which part of “Page 1” doesn’t Coulter understand?) The headline might have provided a clue: “Stock Car Star Killed on Last Lap of Daytona 500.” The piece was written by Robert Lipsyte. Here’s how the Timesman began:

LIPSYTE (page one, 2/19/01): Stock car racing’s greatest current star and one of its most popular and celebrated figures, Dale Earnhardt, crashed and was killed today after he made a characteristically bold lunge for better position on the last turn of the last lap of the sport’s premier event, the Daytona 500.

Lipsyte discussed the crash itself; recent deaths to other drivers; safety devices that had been proposed; and Earnhardt’s role as king of the track. Like Bragg, the Timesman captured the awe in which Earnhardt was held:

LIPSYTE: [NASCAR president Mike] Helton had begun the day by announcing to a drivers’ meeting that because of its new television contract with Fox and NBC, Nascar had finally achieved “absolute professional status.”

At that meeting…Earnhardt sat in the front row, amiably shaking hands with a parade of corporate executives in suits who seemed thrilled to touch him.

The feeling cut across all classes. As he moved through the garage area surrounded by the guests, sponsors and clients of other racing teams, a man with a videocamera reached out and screamed, “I almost touched God.” No one laughed at him.

Of course, Coulter didn’t demean the tone of Lipsyte’s work. Instead, she simply lied about it, saying it didn’t exist. Coulter wanted to close with a bang. She wished Lipsyte out of existence.

What, oh what, are we to do with someone who dissembles like Coulter? Again, we’re quoting the next-to-last paragraph in her whole book. As usual, she builds a screed around an invented fact—one designed to demean those she hates. And just how nasty is Coulter’s conclusion? She draws an ugly conclusion indeed. “Except for occasional forays to the Wal-Mart,” she says, “liberals do not know any conservatives.” But conservatives “already know” liberals, she says. Conservatives know liberals as “savagely cruel bigots who hate America and lie for sport.”

Incredibly, that is Coulter’s final phrase. It closes her strange, disturbed book.

Here:

In Chapter 9, Coulter complains about the press corps’ use of the terms “Christian conservative” and “religious right.” According to Coulter, “[t]he point of the phrase ‘religious right’ or ‘Christian conservative’ is not to define but to belittle.” And lefties, of course, get a pass:

COULTER (page 166): Despite the constant threat of the “religious right” in America, there is evidently no such thing as the “atheist left.” In a typical year, the New York Times refers to either “Christian conservatives” or the “religious right” almost two hundred times. But in a Lexis/Nexis search of the entire New York Times archives, the phrases “atheist liberals” or “the atheist left” do not appear once. Only deviations from the left-wing norm merit labels.

In a footnote, Coulter extends her complaint. “In a one year period (roughly corresponding to calendar year 2000), the New York Times found occasion to mention either ‘Christian conservatives’ or the ‘religious right’ 187 times. Not once did the paper refer to ‘atheist liberals’ or ‘the atheist left.’” To Coulter, of course, this is all a sign of gruesome bias. She goes on to claim that the terms “religious right” and “Christian conservative” are now used “[j]ust as some people once spat out the term ‘Jew’ as an insult.”

It certainly makes for high excitement, but does it make any sense? Do newspapers use “Christian conservative” as an emblem of hatred, and avoid “atheist left” due to liberal bias? If so, we have big news to share. If Coulter’s NEXIS search has proven these things, then the once-conservative Washington Times is spilling with lib bias, too.

In the calendar year 2000, how often did the New York Times refer to “Christian conservatives” or the “religious right?” A NEXIS search of that year presents 182 references. But the Washington Times—a much slimmer paper—had 151 such cites that same year. And how about those other terms—“atheist liberals” or “the atheist left?” Incredibly, Coulter was right in one of her claims; the New York Times never used either term. But guess what? The Washington Times never used the terms, either. If Coulter has sniffed out a vast left-wing plot, Wes Pruden is in on it too.

Why do newspapers write about “Christian conservatives?” Because they exist, and because they’re important. And why don’t we read about the “atheist left?” Because the group doesn’t exist. That’s why the New York Times doesn’t mention the group; that’s why the Washington Times doesn’t mention it, either. Everyone in America knows this is true—until they read Coulter’s cracked book.

But then, such nonsense fills every page of this book. There is no other pundit—of the left, right or center—who engages in such pathological foolishness. Caldwell, a conservative, was prepared to say “Nut.” Why won’t Mickey Kaus say it also?

Here:

When the New York Times’ Janet Maslin reviewed Slander, she had some good solid fun with a footnote. “[O]ne bit of proof that Phyllis Schlafly is treated dismissively by the left comes from a People magazine review of The Muppets Take Manhattan,” she chuckled. Indeed, just how eager was author Ann Coulter to slam the press corps’ treatment of Schlafly? She went all the way back to 1984 to cite the Muppet movie review, which included a jab at the Illinois icon. Of course, Coulter’s text doesn’t say what she’s citing. You have to read the footnote to see how far she went to find a vile slam at the right.

Maslin has some fun with this footnote, but gives too much credence to others. “A great deal of research supports Ms. Coulter’s wisecracks,” she writes—apparently not understanding how much of this “research” has simply been made up by Coulter. Do reviewers ever fact-check books? If Maslin had checked the “780 footnotes” she approvingly cites, she might have seen—and she might have told readers—how much of this book is just false.

As we’ve seen, if Maslin had fact-checked Slander’s first page, she would have found instant dissembling (see the DAILY HOWLER, July 11). Page two? The same sad result. But Coulter loves to mask bogus claims with a footnote. Indeed, when Coulter limns Schlafly, she does it again. She slams the press corps’ performance:

COULTER (page 40): [T]he mainstream media ignore Schlafly when not deploying their trademark elitist snubs. Revealing true facts about Schlafly would inevitably result in unfavorable comparisons with inconsequential feminists. Not one of Schlafly’s books has ever been reviewed in the New York Times. Schlafly is preposterously demeaned with articles reporting that she is trying to remain “relevant.”

That last claim is duly footnoted; Coulter cites a Chicago Tribune piece from 8/1/96. (Her charge is plural, but there’s only one cite.) But in fact, the Tribune’s profile of Schlafly—by the AP’s Jim Salter—is flattering from beginning to end. In paragraph one, Salter says that Schlafly “will be attending her 11th GOP convention this month…showing no intention of being irrelevant” (emphasis added). He closes with a detailed review of Schlafly’s impressive career:

SALTER: Schlafly rose to national prominence in 1964, when she wrote “A Choice Not an Echo,” a history of the Republican convention, regarded as a manifesto for the far Right movement that championed Barry Goldwater.

Then in the early 1970s, Schlafly took on the Equal Rights Amendment, beginning a grassroots anti-ERA effort that eventually led to its defeat. [James] Dobson says Schlafly “almost single-handedly” defeated the amendment.

In the process, she became the subject of scorn by feminists and liberals. She was spit upon, took a public pie in the face. Feminist Betty Friedan once told her, “I’d like to burn you at the stake.” She was vilified in a 1970s “Doonesbury” cartoon.

“That gave me more status with my children than anything I’ve ever done,” Schlafly said, laughing.

In 1976, at age 51, Schlafly was fighting the ERA, writing an 832-page book about Henry Kissinger and raising six children when she entered law school. She graduated 27th out of a class of 204.

Baldly dissembling, Coulter says that this Tribune piece was “preposterously demeaning” to Schlafly. But then, three pages earlier, she told readers that “[t]here is certainly not the remotest possibility that the mainstream media will ever breathe a word of [Schlafly’s] extraordinary accomplishments.” Note to Maslin: If you don’t check all of Coulter’s “research,” she’ll mislead you time after time.

Other footnoted claims about Schlafly are highly bogus. And one more point, kids—Coulter is cagy! According to a NEXIS search, the Washington Times has never reviewed any of Schlafly’s books, either.

Here:

Andrew Malcolm reviewed the book in the August 11 Los Angeles Times. And, like other footnote-counters before him, the Times reviewer was deeply impressed by Coulter’s voluminous research. Incredibly, Malcolm describes the book as “a clever, documented diatribe detailing the media’s alleged liberal orientation” (emphasis added). He refers to Slander’s “205 pages of text and 36 more pages of footnotes citing chapter and verse.”

What’s so “incredible” about Malcolm’s description? By the time his review appeared, the problems with those “pages of footnotes” had been thoroughly documented, all over the Net. Any real journalist surely knows that Slander is factually challenged—quite severely. But misused readers of the Los Angeles Times won’t be burdened with such politically incorrect knowledge. Like the New York Times before it (see THE DAILY HOWLER, 7/22/02), the paper praises Coulter’s footnotes, without saying that her voluminous notes routinely give the lie to the claims in her text.

Our question: Where do papers like the Los Angeles Times find reviewers who are so deeply clueless? We’ll provide the incomparable answer tomorrow. Prepare for an amusing surprise.

HOW CLUELESS: In the meantime, just how clueless is Malcolm’s review? Comically, it singles out one of Slander’s most thoroughly bogus passages:

MALCOLM: A major Coulter point is the media’s ready acceptance of Democrats’ questioning of Republicans’ intelligence. Thus, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush have at least two things in common: All were president and all were not too smart. Bush’s failure on a TV interviewer’s pop quiz of world leaders was, according to Coulter, endlessly cited as proof of his intellectual challenge. Bush was asked about it frequently.

Coulter makes such a claim in Slander. “Andy Hiller, the wise-ass local reporter who sprung the pop quiz on Bush, was giddily feted as if he’d just invented cold fusion,” she writes on page 139, complaining about the “liberal bias” which makes the media so tough to get down.

Malcolm highlights this presentation. In fact, Coulter’s statement about Hiller’s treatment is total, complete, utter fantasy. Hiller popped his quiz on November 3, 1999. Was he “giddily feted” for his conduct? In fact, Hiller was slammed throughout the press as the corps engaged in its standard Group Thinking. As always, pundits recited a list of Standard Spin-Points. Hiller had engaged in gotcha journalism, they said. After all, we were electing a president, not a Jeopardy! champion. And pundits rarely failed to note that they couldn’t have answered Hiller’s questions themselves. Was Hiller “feted” for his quiz? In Coulter’s imagination, yes. Nowhere else on the face of the earth.

What was actually said about Hiller? He was slammed, all over the dial. On the Friday, November 5 Today show, NBC’s David Bloom interviewed Larry Sabato, the press corps’ leading media maestro; Sabato said, of the pop quiz, “It really is pure, unadulterated, gotcha journalism. We’re electing a president, not a Jeopardy! champ.” Elsewhere, Sabato called Hiller’s quiz “the cheapest of cheap shots”—and his views were echoed on the weekend talk shows. On the November 5 NewsHour, for example, Paul Gigot, Mark Shields, and Jim Lehrer all agreed—there was an “ambush, gotcha quality” to Hiller’s “ankle-biting” questions, which “gave journalism another black eye.” Lehrer referred to “the Jeopardy! questions” which Hiller asked; Shields voiced “a sense of relief that I wasn’t asked” them. “Well, you join millions with that one,” Lehrer said—and indeed, all over Washington, pundits were saying that they couldn’t have answered the questions, either. On the November 5 Washington Week, Jeffrey Birnbaum accused Hiller of “gotcha” journalism; Alan Murray said that he couldn’t have answered. On the November 6 Capital Gang, Robert Novak called Hiller a “wise guy reporter” engaging in “gotcha journalism.” “The real problem,” Novak said, “is that winning Jeopardy! games and leading the nation require different skills.” Margaret Carlson called it “gotcha” too. On Meet the Press the following day, William Safire also said “gotcha.” The quiz was “fun and games,” but “phony.”

As usual, mainstream pundits all said the same things—but routinely, they beat up on Hiller. Just on Sunday, November 7, for example, a range of journalists spoke up to say that most people couldn’t have answered those questions. Steve Roberts made the point on CNN’s Late Edition. Ditto for Cokie, on ABC’s This Week, and David Maraniss on Meet the Press. Meanwhile, over at Fox News Sunday, the pundits engaged in some ritual clowning. Hiller’s questions had been so fiendish, the scribes couldn’t answer them still:

TONY SNOW: And now, it’s panel time…Let’s begin with a pop quiz. First, can anybody here at this moment name the prime minister of Chechnya?
BRIT HUME: No.
MARA LIASSON: No.
JUAN WILLIAMS: Absolutely not.
SNOW: I’m clueless, too.
HUME: I heard it the other day, I read the name, I still can’t say it!

Hiller’s questions defied response! For the record, the quiz was called “gotcha” journalism by Gwen Ifill, Andrea Mitchell, Fred Barnes, Juan Williams, Deborah Orin, Al Hunt and Martin Schram, joining Lehrer, Sabato, Birnbaum, Novak and Carlson in that assessment. Jeopardy! comparisons were also widespread, voiced by Morton Kondracke, Clarence Page, Michael Barone and Howard Kurtz, along with Lehrer, Sabato, Mitchell and Novak. Your pundits routinely speak with one voice. In this case, that voice spoke for Bush.

Was Andy Hiller “giddily feted?” In fact, he was slammed in almost every quarter. Indeed, just how silly is the pop quiz punditry as an example of “liberal bias?” Consider where the Standard Points seemed to come from. All over the dial, pundits recited a set of points—but where, oh where had they first been heard? The record on that is abundantly clear; the points were first offered by Bush rep Karen Hughes, speaking to the Associated Press on November 4. “The person who is running for president is seeking to be the leader of the free world, not a Jeopardy! contestant,” Hughes said. “I would venture to guess that 99.9 percent of most Americans and probably most candidates could not answer who is the president of Chechnya.” Her points went out on the AP wire—and were quickly recited all over the press. In Slander, of course, this very episode is used to show the press corps’ overpowering “liberal bias!” But then, this type of silly dissembling is on display all through Coulter’s wreck of a book.

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You probably don't think that the Washington Times is home to overpowering liberal bias. But according to Coulter's new research technique, you were dead wrong in that view. Here at THE HOWLER, we extended Coulter's important work; we went to NEXIS and we ran her phrases through the entire Washington Times archive too. And here are the results we got. You could have gotten them too:

Use of Coulter's key phrases in the Washington Times:
Far right wing: 37 uses
Far left wing: 7 uses That's right, kids. The ratio in the Washington Times is quite close to the ratio found up in Gotham. And by the way, it took roughly forty seconds out of our day to conduct this startling research. Why didn't Coulter do the work too? Simple—she's running The Herd.

Idiots? Panderers? What is the term? What is the term you'd apply to the Coulters, to the Drudges, to the Sullivans too—to all the little Screaming Mimis who peddle this palaver all over town? Choose your poison, but make no mistake. You happen to live in extremely dumb times. Ann Coulter has a new way to prove it.

Master research: By the way, even when you engage in pseudo-research, you still have to clean up your findings. For example, here's one of the items which Coulter included. It concerns b-ball coach Larry Brown:

ARATON: Without a road victory in over a month, deadlocked at a game apiece with a vastly inferior opponent, the Magic trailed deep into the fourth quarter. Then Nick Anderson hit a 3-pointer from the far right wing. Brown remembered a defensive trap that caused a turnover, and the mixture of elation and relief on the Orlando players' faces as they huddled up for a few tender moments. That may not be the "far right wing" you had in mind. F*ck it—she counted it anyway.

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She loves inventing examples in which “the left” uses “airhead” to put down conservatives. Let’s look at one silly example:

COULTER (page 134): Another Republican who failed to meet the exacting IQ standards of the media is President George W. Bush. The image of Bush as an “airhead”—as the New York Times nonjudgmentally put it—has been lovingly nurtured by the media.

Wow! Did the New York Times call Bush an “airhead?” Coulter’s footnote offers two citations. The first is an article by Sam Howe Verhovek on March 12, 2000, right after John McCain dropped his White House campaign. Verhovek’s topic: Where would McCain voters go now that their man was defeated:

VERHOVEK: Bart Ferko, of Oakland Township, Mich., a dance-studio owner, said he had concluded that a real rebel like Mr. McCain could not be elected president. “Obviously, if you’re not part of the network, you’re out,” he said.
Still, if many of these voters express contempt today for both Mr. Gore (“plastic,” “detached,” “a bore” were some of their descriptions) and Mr. Bush (“an airhead,” “out of his depth,” “unqualified”), they also typically said they were likely to vote in November, and to choose one or the other.

In the world of Ann Coulter, that’s an example of the New York Times calling Bush an airhead. Her readers, once again, have no way of knowing how thoroughly they’re being misled.

But then, Coulter loves inventing “airhead” insults. Earlier, she makes a similar bogus claim about favorite mark Katie Couric:

COULTER (page 51): Most politicians would rather die face-down than be ridiculed by Katie Couric…[F]or the media to accuse you of being against “progress and enlightenment” (the New York Times on Jesse Helms) or to call you an “airhead” (Katie Couric, on Ronald Reagan)—well, that makes strong men tremble and weak men liberals.

Wow! Did Katie Couric call Reagan an “airhead?” Sorry, that isn’t true either. Once again, here’s the actual statement by Couric, made on the 9/27/99 Today show:

COURIC: Good morning. The Gipper was an airhead. That’s one of the conclusions of a new biography of Ronald Reagan that’s drawing a tremendous amount of interest and fire today, Monday, September the 27th, 1999.

Clearly, Couric attributed the “airhead” remark to Edmund Morris, the Reagan biographer. And, as we noted in last Friday’s HOWLER, Couric’s statement this day was run-of-the-mill; it was being made all over the media. In particular, conservatives were making this same comment too—Sean Hannity on Fox, for example:

HANNITY, 9/27/99: Welcome back to Hannity & Colmes. I’m Sean Hannity. Coming up, the authorized biography of Ronald Reagan calls him, quote, an airhead. And it is upsetting a lot of the former president’s supporters.

Couric and Hannity said the same thing. Neither called Reagan an airhead.

What’s the background to this story, which Coulter is now widely flogging? We’ll take a look at that tomorrow. But on page 51 of Slander, Coulter plainly says that Couric called Reagan an airhead. It isn’t until page 133 that she notes that Couric was actually quoting somebody. And at that point, Coulter offers another misleading account, putting Couric in the wrong once again. When Coulter hears “airhead” (or “Couric”), she flips.

More on the Couric affair:

But make no mistake—though Morris hadn’t exactly called Reagan an “airhead,” he had come pretty close in some interviews. Newsweek had an early exclusive; it hit the wire on September 26. “After three or four meetings [with Reagan], I realized that culturally he was a yahoo and extremely unresponsive in conversation,” Morris said. “When you asked him a question about himself, it was like dropping a stone into a well and not hearing a splash. I never got anywhere in interviews, except for odd moments of strangeness, like the time I showed him a leaf and he began talking about his boyhood.” The boisterous biographer had more to say as he batted his subject around: “The surface reality of Reagan was boring. His everyday conversation was boring. His documents were boring. He was a mystery that had to be plumbed.” Indeed, Morris told Newsweek that Reagan had seemed “shatteringly banal” when they lunched in 1982. The political world was flogging these statements as Couric went on the air. Indeed, Morris was still talking the talk in a Meet the Press session on October 3. “I have no doubt whatsoever that Reagan was a great man and a great president,” he said. “But some of his conversation, as you may possibly have noticed yourself, in private was quite astonishingly banal.” It was in this context—armed with the Post’s faulty quote—that Couric said Morris called Reagan an “airhead.” In fact, he hadn’t called Reagan an “airhead” at all. He had called him a “yahoo” and “banal.”

Why did Couric say what she did? Because everyone thought it was true. Indeed, despite the picture painted in Slander, many conservatives were slamming Morris for what he had said about Ron. The result? When Morris did the Today show on September 29, Couric gave him a difficult time, challenging him for his rough rap on Ronnie. When Couric and Coulter did battle last month, Couric described the session:

COURIC (6/26/02): I really conducted an extremely challenging interview with [Morris] because he did eviscerate Ronald Reagan in his book. It was a very, very unflattering portrayal. The Reagans were very unhappy with it. Conservatives were very unhappy with it. Afterwards, Edmund Morris was unhappy with the interview, and Nancy Reagan called to thank me for my line of questioning. So I’m just wondering how that jives with your contention that somehow I’m a Ronald Reagan basher?

In response, Coulter dissembled, as always. “Well, I didn’t call you a Ronald Reagan basher,” she said—although that was the obvious meaning of every word that she wrote on the subject. At any rate, Couric said that Nancy Reagan thanked her for her approach to Morris. If you’ve read the text of the Morris interview, there’s no reason to doubt this is true.

How dishonest can Coulter be? “Stunningly” might be a start.

It goes on and on and this is just from a few pages.

Via Dr. Rush Limerick, we have some more quick takes. He mentions another example of using out-of-context words to claim something quite the opposite of what was intended.

4. SLANDER. "Liberals variously call the flag a 'joke,' 'very, very, dumb,' and—most cutting--'not cosmopolitan.'" FACT. Richard Roeper of the Chicago Sun-Times ran this down; none of the three is what AHC would like you to believe. Ann's source for "joke" was Robert Altman, who was criticizing the commercialized overuse of the flag. "[V]ery, very, dumb" came from a controversy over whether the flag should be flown over a 19^th century Hawaiian palace; a University of Hawaii professor said of people who accused Hawaiians of being unpatriotic: "This is when people start acting very, very dumb in their patriotism and flag-waving. I'll take Dan Inouye's empty sleeve as patriotism long before I'll take a passing bumper sticker on my car that says, 'America Forever.' " "Not cosmopolitan" comes from a (pre-9/11) comment by a New York history professor: "New York has just been too much of a cosmopolitan town for flag-waving. It is the home of the UN, and a place filled with tourists, with immigrants, with people doing trade," i.e. "cosmopolitan" in its dictionary sense of "belonging to the world." Altman is the only one of the three who is even demonstrably "liberal," and none of the three is denigrating the flag. They are all denigrating the thoughtless anti-patriotic uses to which it is often put. Roeper's conclusion: "How utterly bogus." ROEPER.

...

17. SLANDER. The media calls only conservative women names like "ugly." FACT. Conservative uglification and derision: Rush Limbaugh on Chelsea Clinton, Hillary Clinton, Ann Richards, Donna Shalala; Jay Leno, others on Janet Reno; AHC herself on Bella Abzug ("A blind man in America would think the ugliest women ever to darken the planet are Paula Jones, Linda Tripp, and Katherine Harris. This from the party of Bella Abzug."). DAVIS, TAP, ROEPER. COMMENT. Let's not forget the National Review's column saying that Chelsea should be killed before she has a chance to reproduce.

Charles Taylor in Salon.com:

The following passage gives a good example of how "Slander" works:

"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'."

The passage is conveniently phrased to make it look as if the quotes, as well as the headline, appear in the Times editorial. They don't (notes in the back of the book identify the sources as former Surgeon General Jocelyn Elder's interview in Playboy, and Joseph Lowery at a meeting of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference quoted in the New Yorker). Coulter sets up the passage to give the impression that the Times called Thomas a "lawn jockey" and a "house Negro" and hopes that we won't notice that she's fudged it.

Convenience is Coulter's m.o. Dismissing the claim that echoes of the rationale for the Oklahoma City bombing can be heard on conservative talk radio, she neglects to mention G. Gordon Liddy's comments on how to effectively kill federal agents. A list that is meant to demonstrate that "liberals have been wrong about everything in the last half-century" includes the Civil Rights Act. She's not against it, but she labels the segregationist Southern Democrats who opposed it as "liberals." She omits the fact that the act was pushed through Congress (as was the Voting Rights Act a year later) by a Democratic president, a product of those segregationist party politics, who understood the moral necessity of the measures and fought like hell to achieve them.

Bryan Keefer in Salon.com:

Another favorite tactics of Coulter's is the use of deceptive paraphrases to distort others' viewpoints. Blogger Scoobie Davis has noted that Coulter misrepresents the views of Frank Rich and Bruce Ackerman on the war on terrorism. Early in the book, Coulter writes that "New York Times columnist Frank Rich demanded that [Attorney General John] Ashcroft stop monkeying around with Muslim terrorists and concentrate on anti-abortion extremists." The column that she cites, however, makes no such argument. Coulter also writes that "Yale law professor Bruce Ackerman recommended dropping the war against global terrorism ('declare war at the first decent opportunity'!) and instead concentrate on 'home-grown extremists.'" Yet Ackerman's column suggests a cautious approach to a global war on terrorism, not "dropping" it, and nowhere does he advocate concentrating on domestic terrorists instead of international terrorists. Coulter's paraphrases are both wild distortions.

Another problem plaguing "Slander" is the deceptive way Coulter uses footnotes to lend a false sense of legitimacy to questionable points. To take one example, in her discussion of media treatment of former Sen. Bob Packwood, R-Ore., she provides a list of 10 quotes alternating between positive coverage prior to his political demise following allegations of sexual harassment, and negative coverage afterward. Coulter introduces the list with the claim that "What happened to Packwood is a stunning example of the media's power both to destroy and protect ... In the case of Packwood, the media's good dog/bad dog descriptions were applied to the exact same human being."

To the casual reader, the list must seem fairly damning. Yet if one flips to the back of the book and checks her sources, it turns out that her claim about "the media" rests on a very small sample. Rather than the 10 different articles the casual reader would assume Coulter is quoting, she relies on one article for four of the five negative quotes, a second for three of the five positive quotes, and a third for the other two positive quotes. In all, the list comes down to four articles -- thin evidence at best for the broad suggestion that coverage of Packwood proves "[t]here is no intellectual honesty whatsoever in media descriptions of politicians," which she makes two paragraphs later.

Coulter's use of quotes from liberal commentators as proof of media bias is equally problematic. She disregards the importance of conservative commentators, by writing, for example, "Rush Limbaugh is not the president, the vice president, or a Massachusetts senator. He's not the New York Times. He's not ABC, NBC, or CBS." Coulter also tells us that "What conservatives object to is not liberal opinion commentary, but rather ostensibly objective news coated with smears." Yet much of her evidence for media bias and unfair attacks on conservatives comes from the opinion columns of liberal pundits. Particularly damaging is the way in which she bases broad comments about "the media" in at least two places exclusively on opinion columns. Writing that "the media quickly sketched out the larger themes" about Bush's intelligence, she cites the Kansas City Star's Steve Kraske and the New York Times' Maureen Dowd and Thomas Friedman to support the contention that the media portrayed George W. Bush as dumb -- all of whom are columnists.

In all, Coulter offers more than 40 citations of columnists and pundits to support her assertion that conservatives are treated unfairly by the mainstream media. Though most of these quotes are identified as coming from commentators, and some of her examples are certainly outrageous, the danger is that the casual reader may interpret many of these as evidence of reportorial bias. If read carefully, however, much of her evidence reveals little more than then banal fact that liberal pundits and the New York Times editorial page are critical and often unfairly dismissive of conservatives and their policies. Using Coulter's methodology, one could easily string together quotes from conservative pundits and Op-Ed pages to make the case that the media treats liberals unfairly, rather than conservatives.

In addition to her troubles with facts, Coulter also engages in what my co-editor Brendan Nyhan has called "some of the most consistently emotional, subrational jargon in national politics." Throughout "Slander," she uses what Nyhan identifies as her three favorite tactics: various names and issues used solely to rile her readers' emotions; vicious, sweeping attacks on "liberals"; and loaded language and nasty insinuations disguised as rational arguments. Former President Bill Clinton comes in for some of the harshest treatment; she refers to the "pizza boxes, women's panties, and other detritus of the Caligula administration," describes his "adolescent cramming in all-night slumber parties, leaving the place littered with pizza rinds and women's panties" and refers to him as "IMPOTUS" and "the felon." Coulter even uses "clintonized" as an adjective without a capital letter, genericizing the name into an attack as others have done. Nor is she above simple name-calling, referring to Katie Couric as "the affable Eva Braun of morning TV" and referring to Tom Rosenstiel of the Committee of Concerned Journalists as "Concern Propagandist Rosenstiel."

Coulter also pummels nonsensical straw-man caricatures of political opponents throughout the book. Most obvious and striking is her treatment of "liberals." Without ever bothering to define exactly who she intends the term to include (at various points it includes Andrew Sullivan and Republican-turned-Independent Sen. Jim Jeffords, R-Vt.), she makes sweeping judgments:

"Even Islamic terrorists don't hate America like liberals do."
"[T]he left is itching to silence conservatives once and for all."
"[I]f Americans knew what they [liberals] really believed, the public would boil them in oil."
""Principle is nothing to liberals. Winning is everything."

Of course, in Coulter's asymmetrical political world, conservatives are universally good:

"[A]lmost all serious debate takes place exclusively among conservatives."
"[C]onservatives in America are the most tolerant (and long-suffering) people in America."
"[W]hen right-wingers rant, there's at least a point: There are substantive arguments contained in conservative name-calling."

See Scoobie Davis for more.

Let me say it again. The very fact that Ann Coulter remains highly "successful" and gets repeated invitations to "mainstream media" talk shows (especially Fox News) clearly argues against the "liberal media" myth. Indeed, it points to the opposite. One can never imagine anyone on the left who is even remotely in her category being invited again and again to such talk shows despite a history of almost unprecedented fraud and demonstrated bigotry and hatred. In many respects, it would seem that Ann Coulter's career alone would allow me to rest my case - that the U.S. has an illiberal, conservative media (ICM).