October 9, 2003 by s.z.

Ann Coulter: A Gentleman and a Scholar

Poor Ann Coulter.  Edward Nawotka of Publishers Weekly asks Al Franken questions like, "You fact checked Ann Coulter's book and found a lot of inconsistencies, outright lies, and quotes that are taken out of context. Who is responsible for those kinds of errors, the author or the editors?" 

But he asks ANN things like, "What gives--was this an honest mistake or malfeasance as he suggests?"  Clearly, this is a case of Liberal Media Bias, as Ann alleges in her sarcastic title: Guess You're Right: There Is No Liberal Media Bias

Ann is a major snit about this, and uses her column to tell the PW interviewer all the stuff she thought of after she got home:

Apparently, Ed, it never occurred to you that Franken's allegations of errors in my book -- or "outright lies" as you put it -- are false.

Ann, I'm not Ed, but I think I can answer for him and all of sane America when I say, No, it never occurred to us that Franken's allegations of "errors" or "lies" in your work were false.  Mainly, because he isn't the only one making these charges -- half the web is devoted to documenting all the "errors" in your books.  Ann, you alone keep Spinsanity in business!  Even the people on your side (see, for instance, The Trouble with “Treason”) admit that "It is a shame that Coulter mars her case with claims that cannot be sustained." 

Ann, maybe your semi-illiterate fans will accept, because you say it, that you were right and Franken and everybody else in the world is wrong, and that the earth really is flat, and we've been duped by the liberal media for all these years.  But they wouldn't be reading Publishers Weekly anyway, so why bother to set them straight on claims  they'd never hear about if it wasn't for you using your soap box to denounce them?   I can only conclude that Franken got under your skin, like he did Bill O'Reilly's, and since your publisher won't sue Franken because they know that truth is always a defense against libel, and you (like O'Reilly) don't really dare challenge Franken to fist fight, that you just wanted to vent some spleen at Edward Nawotka, because he had the nerve to indicate that he liked Al's book better than yours.  (BTW, it's #1 on the Non-Fiction Best Seller list again, Ann.  Yours is what, 20th or so?  Must hurt, huh?)

Anyway, Ann then brings up a scant few of Franken's charges (the ones which she claims to have already debunked).  For example, she says that SHE never told a reporter that she was friendly with Franken, the reporter just got confused.  She admits that while she did say mistakenly say that Socialist candidate Norman Thomas was Evan Thomas's father, since Franken never admitted that Norman was Evan's grandfather, HE's the one who is lying.  And she concedes that while she did incorrectly say that the NYT didn't mention Dale Earnhardt's death on the front page the day after his death, "this is the only vaguely substantive error the Ann Coulter hysterics have been able to produce, corrected soon after publication.  CONGRATULATIONS LIBERALS!!! "

Thanks, Ann!!!  Oh, but we liberals wish to mention that this error was corrected at the insistence of the PUBLISHER after the "Ann Coulter hysterics" pointed it out, so it's not like Ann did some post-publication checking and was shocked to have found that an error had creept into her work.  And the fact that Ann could misreport on something THIS easy to ascertain indicates that she doesn't know how to use Lexis-Nexis, and that some kindly Richard Mellon Scaife really should give her those Harvard Grad students that David Horowitz was whining about a while back.

And then Ann apparently catches hysteria from the "Ann Coulter hysterics", and really starts to froth, bringing up some another charge that really gets her goat, even though it wasn't in Franken's book :

FRAZIER MOORE, A FANTASIST FOR THE ASSOCIATED PRESS, WROTE AN ARTICLE ACCUSING ME OF USING "ROUTINELY SLOPPY" RESEARCH AND "CONTRIVED" FACTS. LIKE YOU, THE AP FANTASIST TREATS FRANKEN AS THE SOURCE OF ALL WISDOM, CITING ONE KILLER EXAMPLE FROM FRANKEN:

"Here's one: On pages 265-266, Coulter blasts New York Times writer Thomas Friedman for opposing racial profiling in a December 2001 column. She quotes (and credits) several passages that seem to back up her complaint. But it turns out that Coulter misappropriated Friedman's words in a way that has nothing to do with racial profiling or anything else addressed in his column, as anyone who reads it will discover. His column actually drew the less-than-startling conclusion that a new age of terrorism threatens our personal safety and our free society."

This is what is known as "bicycle accident reporting." I defy anyone to explain what head-injury boy is trying to convey in his crucial, accusatory sentence: "Coulter misappropriated Friedman's words in a way that has nothing to do with racial profiling or anything else addressed in his column. "Huh? The AP could throw a deck of cards out the window and wait to see who picks up the four of clubs to find someone who writes better than Frazier Moore.

Ann, a helpful bit of advice: People who live in "During my recent book tour, I resisted the persistent, illiterate request that I name traitors" houses, shouldn't throw stones at other people's writing.

Anyway, I looked up Ann's article (Racial Profiling): I looked up Friedman's (Flying Naked).  In my opinion, Head-Injury boy is right.  Ann did mischaracterize Friedman's Pulizer Prize-winning piece.  Friedman did no sniffing.  He maligned no innocent Amish fundamentalists.  His whole piece is about personal safety and our free society, not just the last 4 paragraphs, as Ann claims.  Ann's indignation and her insistance that SHE DID TOO ACCURATELY DESCRIBE THIS PIECE AND EVERYBODY KNOWS IT, indicate to me that perhaps Ann has bigger problems than simple dishonesty and sloppiness: she seems to have severe reading comprehension problems, and possible schizophrenia, in that she really doesn't see reality the same way normal people do.

Ann then delivers this message to Nawotka and everybody else who has ever said her work is a pack o' lies: she will deal with his "two all-new" alleged lies (which were in Franken's book which came out a couple of months ago, so can't be considered all that new), and then will never again grace these kinds of persistant, illiterate questions with a response.

Now you spring two all-new alleged "outright lies" on me. I shall respond to these two, and then I'm through.  Henceforth, I shall rely on sensible people to see that I have answered the liberal hate groups' first 17 rounds of indignant charges against me.  If they had a better example out there, we would have heard it before the 18th round.

LOL.  Yes, sensible people have seen that Ann has responded to 17 charges (out of about 1000 documented instances of errors, mischaracterizations, and lies on her part) by conceding that some were somebody's else's fault, some aren't true [in BIZARRO WORLD!], and the rest, while true, really aren't important.  And therefore, these sensible people will agree that Ann doesn't ever have to respond to charges of inaccuracy and lying again, because she has a doctor's excuse.

But let's look at the last two charges from Franken's book which Ann lays to rest:

First, you say: "AT ONE POINT [FRANKEN] ACCUSES YOU OF HAVING TAKEN A QUOTE FROM A BOOK REVIEW QUOTING A BOOK (P. 14 OF FRANKEN'S BOOK) TO ARGUE YOUR POINT. DO YOU FEEL THIS IS AN ACCURATE REPRESENTATION OF WHAT YOU WROTE? AN ACCURATE USE OF A QUOTE? IF NOT, THEN WHY? IF YES, THEN WHO IS ULTIMATELY RESPONSIBLE FOR THE ERRORS, YOU, THE PUBLISHER, OR BOTH?"

I'm not sure I grasp the accusation here and I'm sure you do not. I wrote: "For decades, the New York Times had allowed loose associations between Nazis and Christians to be made in its pages."  Among the quotes I cited, one came from a New York Times book review.  The quote made a loose association between Nazis and Christians. New York Times book reviews are printed in the pages of the New York Times.  The Times allowed that quote to run in its pages.  How else, exactly, are you suggesting I should have phrased this, Ed?

Ann, what I think you didn't tell Ed is that in your book you also said: "Statements like these were not uncommon: 'Did the Nazi crimes draw on Christian tradition?' .... 'the church is co-responsible for the Holocaust.'" 

Pretty damning stuff if the NYT were endorsing those views.

However, the first quote comes from a book review, and the reviewer is using a question to tell you what the book is purportedly about.  (BTW, the other quote came from a long discussion of the causes of the Holocaust, with one critic of the Catholic Church saying that the church was co-responsible for the Holocaust, and a Jewish Historian saying that Pope Pius was responsible for saving 750,000 Jews -- hardly the NYT taking the position that Christians are Nazis.)  That the NY Times reviews all kinds of books, including books which talk about Nazi crimes and Christian traditions does not mean that they, as a paper, portrayl Christians as "Nazis," which is what you are insinuating.

As to how a responsible, ethical writer would have phrased it, it might have gone something like this: "For decades, the New York Times had allowed the word 'Nazis' and the world 'Christians' to appear in the same issue of the paper, albeit on different pages.  In fact, once they even went so far as to review a book which had as its thesis question: 'Did the Nazi crimes draw on the Christian tradition?'  While the reviewer didn't think that they did, those words still appeared within the pages of the NYT."

That's how you do it, Ann, if you're honest.

Second, you say: "LIKEWISE, [FRANKEN] ACCUSES YOU OF SLOPPY RESEARCH, IN SO FAR AS YOU APPEAR TO HAVE MISSED A NUMBER OF NEW YORK TIMES ARTICLES CITING SUCH THINGS AS SPEECHES BY JESSE JACKSON. WHAT GIVES--WAS THIS AN HONEST MISTAKE OR MALFEASANCE AS HE SUGGESTS?

It was neither, but thanks for asking. I wrote: "In an upbeat message delivered on British TV on Christmas Day, 1994, Jesse Jackson compared conservatives in the U.S. and Great Britain to Nazis: "In South Africa, the status quo was called racism. We rebelled against it. In Germany, it was called fascism. Now in Britain and the U.S. it is called conservatism.' The New York Times did not report the speech."

The New York Times did not, in fact, report the speech. Franken does not say otherwise. My guess is -- and this is just a stab in the dark -- Franken doesn't say otherwise because he can't say otherwise, inasmuch as . . . THE NEW YORK TIMES DID NOT REPORT THE SPEECH. What Franken says is that my search method was faulty -- though, somehow, it still managed to produce the truth! (To wit: The New York Times did not report the speech.)

Among my searches, I searched the New York Times database for all of December, 1994 and January 1995 for: "Jesse Jackson and Germany and fascism and South Africa. "(In my footnotes, I often give my readers clear descriptions of some of the Lexis-Nexis searches I ran -- something, as far as I know, no other writer does.)

Franken does not mention the lines I had just quoted from Jackson's speech -- you know, the one that was NOT reported in the New York Times -- but refers to it only as a "controversial speech. "He then acts incredulous that I would run a search for "Jesse Jackson and Germany and fascism and South Africa," as if I tossed in the terms "Germany" "fascism" and "South Africa" for no reason whatsoever. To my observation that this search turned up no documents, he says sarcastically: "Well, yeah."

To borrow a line from a trained journalist: What gives, Ed? Was this an honest mistake or malfeasance

Ann, Franken says the NYT DID SO report on the speech.  They might not have used that quote that you loved so much (I suspect that they reported on a "controversial speech" on "racism" given by Jesse Jackson in England in December, 1994), but Al says they did indeed discuss it within their paper.  He says you're just a bad researcher.  So do a couple of Internet people, who said they tried Lexis-Nexis searches, and found a story about Jesse's speech in the NYT.  I say that you are a anorexic liar if you are claiming that because "Franken did not mention the lines [you] quoted", it means that he said he couldn't find any NYT reporting on the speech you are talking about.   

I tried searching for the article myself, but I can't afford Lexis-Nexis and the NYT online archives don't go back that far, so instead I did a Google search with the following results:

"Your search - 'ann coulter's book treason' 'Joseph mccarthy was a drunken demogogue' - did not match any documents." 

Therefore, I must conclude that Ann's book did not cover Mccarthy or McCarthyism, and that she's a stinking liar if she says it does.

So, to answer the question you asked of Nawotka, Ann, I think that your entire body of work is a case of dishonest malfeasance.

P.S.  Bill O'Reilly Stomps Out of NPR Interview

If you want to hear a snit fit, go to NPR's recorded Fresh Air interview with Bill O'Reilly(Oct 08).  Bill calls it a "hatchet job", but actually it's all very civil, and quite fair and balanced, if I may say so.  Bill's blood pressure clearly starts to rise when Terry asks him if it was fair to call Janet Maslin a "character assasin" just for reviewing Al Franken's book (Bill thinks it is, because in her review of Franken's book she printed some of Al's libelous charges about Bill without identifying Al as her primary source, which is "an outrageous violation of journalistic ethics"; and anyway, she "toes the company line," and the NYT is out to destroy Bill for countering their evil "secularism" agenda).  (Oh, another aside in the interest of fairness: Bill claims that it was "blatantly dishonest" of Janet to print that Al said that Bill falsely claimed to have won a Peabody award, when if Janet had listened to the tapes or checked the transcripts, she would have learned that Bill was just defending his former show, and said that "those guys" won a Peabody, um, Polk award.  Well, I HAVE checked the transcripts, and what Bill says is "WE won a Peabody, the highest award in journalism".) 

Bill calms down when Terry lets him pontificate about how Bill believes in God because "nature is perfect," in that there's "food and water" here and the "the sun goes up, the sun goes down."  And how going to Catholic school taught Bill to "respect other people."  And he talks about his book, and how it's designed to HELP people, and how it teaches people to be better parents, and how it does a great job of clarifying what the Founding Father wanted for this nation, because Bill has a degree in history, etc., etc., for at least 10 minutes.

However, when Terry says she's going to read a brief People Magazine review of Bill's new book in which the reviewer says that he gave Bill's last book an unfavorable review and was later surprised to turn on Bill's show and find that he was Bill's "Most Ridiculous Item of the Week" (the little corner of Bill's show where he gets back at everybody who's been mean to him).  

Per People, Bill denounced the man for "reviewing the person, not the book," and then called the reviewer a "pinhead," which the reviewer thought was rather inconsistent.

Anyway, when Terry said she was going to read the review, Bill repeatedly tried to shout her down, but when she persisted, Bill claimed that he had been invited to discuss his book, but once he was there, found he was being asked to defend charges against himself (not fun when the shoe's on the other foot, is it, Bill?).  He claimed that they had given Al Franken a pass, but were defaming Bill, and so NPR obviously had an agenda (agenda's are only fun when YOU'RE doing the agenda-ing, huh?), and then stomped out without letting the host respond to anything he had said. 

And now, here's Bill (My Show, My Spin ):

The Most Ridiculous Item of the Day

I had to stop an interview with NPR today because the conversation got completely out of hand. It was supposed to be about my new book Who's Looking Out For You? I say supposed to be.

On The Radio Factor Wednesday, I'm going to play you some of that interview -- it's also posted on billoreilly.com right now -- so you can hear what happened.

The program is called Fresh Air, and I knew the people were not going to be fair, but I decided to let it play out. That program gave one of the smear merchants running around the country a total pass when it interviewed him.  But, in my conversation, they were much more aggressive, and I actually enjoyed telling the woman off, and I think you'll enjoy hearing it.

If you want to know the ridiculous truth about NPR and Fresh Air, go to billoreilly.com, or listen to The Radio Factor tomorrow. Very interesting.

And what makes this "very interesting" is that:

During the Fresh Air interview, Bill complained about how people cut down an interview to just a few minutes to make him look bad, and now here he is, just sharing with his  followers the part where he "tells the woman off."

And, during the Fresh Air interview, he says that his program is "civil and respectful," and "if I were a bully, my audience wouldn't sit for it," because Americans don't like that kind of thing."  But he thinks you'll enjoying hearing him tell off a soft-spoken, polite woman on NPR.

And in the Fresh Air interview, Bill deplores the fact that "There is a market for books where people attack the people they disagree with."  And here Bill is relishing the fact that he enjoyed "telling off" a woman who he disagreed with.

And Bill, that's why your our MOST RIDICULOUS ITEM OF THE DAY

Oh, and Bill says that Publisher's Weekly gave Bill's book a"rave review," and that they're "fair and balanced."  So, I guess the problem is just YOU, Ann Coulter.

3:42:31 AM