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 TV? 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
newsmag 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
"[p] unditry would be so
much duller without her humor and fire," assuring
us that "[o] n TV or
in person, you can trust that Coulter will speak
from her heart." It’s
the newsmag 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,"
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 a book review in The
Washington Times, 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 suggested
that Somerby take
it a step further. And guess what? It turns out
that the Georgetown
University law professors whose book was under
review protested having
opinions attributed to them that they’d denounced
as hateful bigotry.
It’s all make-believe. Every word of it.
Correction: Contrary
to my April 13 column, Sen. Sam Brownback, R-Kan.,
has never been a member of Opus Dei, a theologically
conservative Roman
Catholic order. Although Brownback converted
to Catholicism under the
guidance of Rev. John McCloskey, an Opus Dei
priest, he never joined the
organization. I regret the error.
http://www.nwanews.com/story.php?paper=adg§ion=Edito