FAIR Action Alert: Time Covers Coulter

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Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting
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ACTION ALERT:
Time Covers Coulter:
Magazine's Cover Story a Sloppy, Inaccurate Tribute to Far-Right Pundit

April 21, 2005


A week after she was praised in Time magazine's "100 Most Influential
People" issue (4/18/05), the magazine went a step further by making
far-right pundit Ann Coulter the subject of a lengthy April 25 cover
story. Readers who might have looked for a critical examination of the
overexposed, factually challenged hatemonger found something else: a puff
piece that gave Coulter a pass on her many errors and vicious, often
bigoted rhetoric.

Throughout the article, Time reporter John Cloud gave Coulter every
benefit of the doubt. Her clear, amply documented record of inaccuracy
was waved away. Coulter's notoriously vitriolic hate speech was
alternately dismissed as a put-on or excused as "from her heart," while
the worst Cloud could say about her was that she can "occasionally be
coarse." Time readers learned that Coulter is an omnivorous reader (one
of exactly two examples of her consumption being the Drudge Report
website), and that she regards herself "as a public intellectual."
Coulter, who writes a syndicated newspaper column and makes frequent cable
news appearances, is dubbed "iconic" by Time because she "epitomizes the
way politics is now discussed on the airways."

In reality, there are few who "discuss" politics the Coulter way-- by
smearing opponents as traitors, calling for a renewal of McCarthyism and
endorsing the killing of reporters.



--Coulter's Accuracy

"Coulter has a reputation for carelessness with facts, and if you Google
the words 'Ann Coulter lies,' you will drown in result," wrote Cloud.
"But I didn't find many outright Coulter errors."

That would depend on how one defines "many" or "outright." Websites like
the Daily Howler, Tapped, Media Matters and Spinsanity have pointed out
literally dozens of errors in Coulter's book Slander and other Coulter
statements. Coulter directed Cloud to one error she now admits to making,
about the New York Times supposedly ignoring the death of NASCAR driver
Dale Earnhardt (an error she lied about making when she appeared on FAIR's
CounterSpin--8/9/02). Coulter managed to make yet another error in her
explanation to Cloud, but this didn't seem to lead Cloud to dig any
deeper. As Salon's Eric Boehlert pointed out (4/19/05), Slander's
publisher made five corrections after its initial printing-- and should
have made at least six more.

But it's important to acknowledge that Coulter is, in a sense, hard to
"fact check" because she rarely makes arguments based on facts. Appearing
on television programs to say that liberals "want there to be lots of
9/11s" (Fox News, 10/13/03) can either be treated as a serious argument
for which she has no evidence, or explained away as "opinion." Such cheap
and disgusting smears tend to be acceptable by mainstream media
standards-- so long as they're coming out of Coulter's mouth.


--Benefit of the doubt

Throughout the article, Cloud presented instances where Coulter was
allegedly misunderstood or underappreciated. And in each case, Cloud
either gave Coulter a pass, or concluded that her opponents were wrong.
Cloud generously wrote that Coulter "likes to shock reporters by wondering
aloud whether America might be better off if women lost the right to
vote"-- as if she writes or speaks such things on national television only
to get a rise out of journalists. Cloud also argued that Coulter can
"write about gender issues with particular sensitivity," an odd trait to
attribute to someone who recently claimed that women are "not that bright"
(Fox News, 9/23/04).

Cloud also recalled a TV debate over environmentalism where Coulter
offered her typical hyperbole: "God gave us the earth. We have dominion
over the plants, the animals, the seas.... God said, 'Earth is yours. Take
it. Rape it. It's yours.'"

Unfortunately, wrote Cloud, "her rape-the-planet bit would later be
wrenched from context and repeatedly quoted as Coulter nuttiness." The
context, apparently, is that she was laughing when she said it-- and that,
as Coulter put it, her critics "don't get the punch line"-- which was that
raping the Earth is preferable to "living like the Indians." Cloud
admitted that maybe not everyone would find the slur funny-- but doesn't
seem to understand that laughing about "raping" the Earth is no less
offensive than making the suggestion with a straight face.

In recounting two of Coulter's more notorious TV appearances, Cloud found
fault with everyone else. Recalling her firing from MSNBC for
disdainfully telling a disabled Vietnam vet, "No wonder you guys lost,"
Cloud interjected that the veteran, Robert Muller, was incorrect when he
claimed that 90 percent of U.S. landmine casualties in Vietnam came from
"our mines" used by enemy forces. Cloud-- who had been unable to find
many errors in Coulter's work-- rebutted Muller by saying that a 1969
Pentagon report found that "90 percent of the components used in enemy
mines came from U.S. duds and refuse"-- a minor if not meaningless
distinction. Cloud also recalled that the MSNBC incident "became an
infamous-- and oft-misreported-- Coulter moment" because outlets like the
Washington Post had misquoted Coutler as saying, "People like you caused
us to lose that war." Cloud ignored the fact that the source of the
paraphrase was Coulter herself (Extra!, 11-12/02).

Cloud also recounted a recent interview with the Canadian Broadcasting
Corporation where Coulter, arguing that Canada should participate in the
war in Iraq, claimed that "Canada sent troops to Vietnam." When CBC
interviewer Bob McKeown said she was wrong about that, Coulter pledged to
get back to them about it-- but never did. Cloud rushed to the rescue by
noting that "Canada did send noncombat troops to Indochina in the 1950s
and again to Vietnam in 1972." Cloud is making quite a stretch to prove
that Coulter was correct-- Canada was officially neutral during the
Vietnam War, so if any noncombat troops were sent (none are mentioned in a
detailed 1975 U.S. Army history, Allied Participation in Vietnam), they
would not have been sent to support U.S. forces there. Again, Cloud went
out of his way to cast doubt on statements made by Coulter's critics,
applying no such scrutiny to Coulter herself-- the ostensible subject of
his article.



--Coulter's Bigotry

Cloud downplayed Coulter's record of rank bigotry and racism. Recounting
her defense of racial profiling, Cloud wrote, "It would be easier to
accept Coulter's reasoning if a shadow of bigotry didn't attach to many of
her statements about Arabs and Muslims." Cloud did not explain how this
bigoted "shadow" mysteriously "attaches" itself to Coulter's words, but
the strange metaphor does serve to distance Coulter from her obvious
hatefulness. Ironically, in another part of the story, Cloud recalled
that Coulter once wrote that school desegregation has led to "illiterate
students knifing one another between acts of sodomy in the stairwell."
One wonders if the "shadow" of racism will find its way to that statement
as well. Cloud also noted that Coulter once said in a speech, "Liberals
are about to become the last people to figure out that Arabs lie"-- a
comment Cloud dubbed "flagrantly impolitic," as if it's simply bad form to
make a slanderous generalization about an entire ethnicity.



--Misleading Graphics

To illustrate the left's reaction to Coulter, the article was accompanied
by a photo of a demonstration where a poster labels Coulter a
"neo-imperialist criminal" and an "enemy," and her mouth is covered by a
censorious red X. "Protesters blast Coulter at the GOP Convention in New
York City last year," the caption explained. What readers weren't told is
that the poster was a right-wing satire, part of a pro-Republican
counter-demonstration; Time cropped out the name of the organization
responsible for the poster-- "Communists for Kerry"-- as well as another
sign behind it promoting "Criminals for Gun Control." Does Time really
pay so little attention to the graphics that it uses-- or was the cropping
an attempt to make sure that readers wouldn't be in on the joke?

(The online version of Time, which ran an uncropped version of the photo,
now identifies the sign-holders as "pro-GOP protesters" and appends a
correction saying that "the original caption incorrectly stated that these
protesters were blasting Coulter.")



--Any Precedent?

Time readers who aren't aware of Coulter's work might wonder why a
far-right TV pundit would be worth so much attention. Some media
observers, like Washington Post reporter Howard Kurtz (4/19/05), recalled
that filmmaker Michael Moore made the magazine's July 12, 2004 cover.

Moore and Coulter share little in terms of tone or content; nonetheless,
the comparison is worth exploring, since it reveals that Moore was held to
a much different standard. The text on the Coulter cover asks, "Is she
serious or just having fun?" For Moore, the release of his film
Fahrenheit 9/11 led Time to ask on its cover, "Is this good for America?"

The Moore feature included a stand-alone sidebar that addressed his
alleged inaccuracies, and gave ample space to critics who derided the
movie. On top of that, conservative columnist Andrew Sullivan was given a
separate piece to savage Fahrenheit 9/11 along with Mel Gibson's "The
Passion of the Christ," calling them "crude, boring, gratuitous," and
charging Moore with using "innuendo, sly editing, parody, ridicule and
somber voiceovers to give his mere assertions a patina of truth."

The point is not that Moore should be treated the same as Coulter. In
fact, Moore's film was premiering across the country, smashing all
box-office records for documentaries, and had won international acclaim,
making his work of bonafide journalistic interest. By contrast, Coulter's
latest book is a months-old collection of columns, and if not for a
handful of cable news appearances this year she would be almost completely
invisible in the national debate.

At one point, Cloud asked rhetorically: "How did such a flagrantly
impolitic person become such a force in our politics?" The answer is
obvious: The mainstream media has granted her the time and space to
spread her message. And if Cloud's own credulous writing is any
indication, that's not going to change anytime soon.


ACTION:
Please contact Time's John Cloud and tell him you were disappointed that
his article played down Ann Coulter's bigotry and inaccuracy.

CONTACT:
Time Magazine
Phone: [phone]
mailto:[e-mail]

As always, please remember that your comments have more impact if you
maintain a polite tone.