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IssuesOn Hannity & Colmes, Coulter continues attack on single motherhood, calling it "a recipe to create criminals, strippers, rapists, murderers"
On the January 5 edition of Fox
News' Hannity & Colmes,
right-wing pundit Ann Coulter defended inflammatory and offensive comments she
makes about single mothers and children whose parents divorce in her new book, Guilty: Liberal
"Victims" and Their Assault on America. Coulter referred
to one statement in the book -- that children whose parents divorce are "future strippers" -- as "something that
needs to be said," later saying of her book's contention that the
children of divorces would become strippers: "Yes, and they will be, and
that is a fact." Also during her Hannity
& Colmes interview, immediately after saying, "I don't
insult single mothers," Coulter referred to single motherhood as "a
recipe to create criminals, strippers, rapists, murderers," echoing her
statement in Guilty that
"[s]ingle motherhood is like a farm team for future criminals and social
outcasts." After co-host Alan Colmes challenged Coulter by saying of
single mothers, "So you're insulting them," Coulter replied,
"No, I am insulting single motherhood, which is avidly promoted by the
left."
According to her website,
Coulter is scheduled to be interviewed during both the 7 a.m. and 10 a.m. ET
hours of the January 7 edition of NBC's Today, after reports
on January 5 that her scheduled January 6
appearance on that show had been canceled. Media Matters for America
has documented that NBC has repeatedly provided Coulter a platform to spew her inflammatory rhetoric even as NBC-affiliated hosts and
anchors -- including Today
co-hosts Meredith Vieira and Matt Lauer -- have expressed disapproval of
her statements or criticized the media for promoting her.
From Coulter's website:
Published: Tue, 06 Jan 2009 17:51:35 GMT - Source: Mediamatters.Org - Read the articleIssuesCoulter: Today cancels, but CBS' Early Show to host her
In a January 5 update to her website, author and syndicated columnist Ann Coulter
announced that the appearances
she was scheduled to make on
the January 6 edition of NBC's Today
had been canceled, but that she would be appearing that day on CBS' The Early Show. As Media Matters for America has noted, Coulter recently announced that
she was scheduled to
appear on Today
to promote the release of her new book, Guilty:
Liberal "Victims" and Their Assault on America,
which Media Matters found to
contain numerous falsehoods and inflammatory statements. As Media Matters noted, hosts and anchors on NBC itself
and affiliates -- including Today co-hosts Meredith Vieira and Matt Lauer, Tonight host Jay Leno, Hardball host Chris Matthews, Nightly News
anchor Brian Williams, and CNBC's Big Idea host
Donny Deutsch --
have expressed disapproval of, in Leno's words, Coulter's "harsh" and
"nasty" statements, or criticized the media for promoting her.
For instance, discussing Coulter's October 8, 2007,
appearance on The Big
Idea -- during which Coulter asserted that "we"
Christians "just want Jews to be perfected" -- Deutsch said
on the October 12, 2007, edition of Today: "And I think that's
what -- we're playing dangerous with words in our society that there's no
accountability. There's a glibness that we in the media kind of elevate, and
I'm here to kind of say I'm personally tired of it, and I think America
is tired of it also." Deutsch later told Vieira that someone might ask,
"Aren't we part of the problem?" Vieira responded: "Of course we
are. We're perpetuating it."
In a January 5 blog post, Politico
staff writer Michael Calderone also noted
Coulter's announcement that her Today
appearance had been
canceled, writing: "Media Matters has been picking apart the book,
and last week asked the following: "Is NBC going to help
Coulter sell this book?" Seems like they're not."
From Coulter's website:
Published: Mon, 05 Jan 2009 22:35:00 GMT - Source: Mediamatters.Org - Read the articleIssuesMedia Matters: The media's Minnesota debacle
With only about 200
votes out of nearly 3 million cast separating Minnesota Sen. Norm Coleman and his Democratic challenger,
Al Franken, the race is headed to a recount.
Naturally, conservative radio hosts are working themselves
into a lather, baselessly accusing
Democrats of trying to "steal" the election. That shouldn't
surprise anyone. But NBC and The New York
Times have also pushed the dubious notion that the Minnesota recount has been plagued by chaos
and impropriety.
Here's
how Meredith Vieira, co-host of NBC's Today, began a report on the Minnesota
recount: "If you thought the election debacle in Florida
could never happen again, wait until you see the situation in Minnesota."
This is nonsense. The "debacle" in Florida wasn't
that there was a recount; the "debacle" was an absurdly designed ballot that led to
thousands of people who
meant to vote for Al Gore voting for Pat Buchanan instead. The "debacle"
was that thousands of voters were improperly
purged from voter rolls.
The "debacle" was that the state's electoral votes were
awarded to the candidate for whom fewer voters attempted to cast ballots. None
of those factors are present in Minnesota.
The Minnesota Senate race is simply in the midst of a
recount. Recounts happen. They aren't the illegitimate, anything-goes street fights the media
pretend they are; they are a part of how elections work, their process written
into law and executed every year. They are necessary, for a perfectly obvious
reason: They make it
more likely that the candidate who receives the most votes takes office. That
is an unequivocally good thing.
During that Today
segment, reporter Lee Cowan announced that the situation "has some
remembering shades of Florida,
of butterfly ballots and hanging chads. There are neither of those here."
What possible
reason could there be for bringing up "butterfly ballots and hanging
chads," given that "there are neither of those" present in Minnesota? Whatever the
intent, the effect is clear -- it creates the impression that the situation in Minnesota is utter chaos, a "debacle" in
the making.
Cowan continued: "Still, ballots have suddenly
appeared out of nowhere, including some found unsecured in an election worker's
car."
That appears to be completely false. Election officials have
said the ballots did not "suddenly appear[] out of nowhere," and
they were not "unsecured." The claim about unsecured ballots in a
car appears to have originated with Norm Coleman's lawyer. Cowan did not attribute
the car story to anyone or anything,
he simply asserted it as fact. Adopting and repeating Coleman's
lawyer's claims as though they are facts is bad enough. What
makes it worse is that the lawyer had already backed off the claim. Two full
days before Cowan's report, the Coleman lawyer had been quoted saying that "we've heard
enough from the city attorney to let go of this. It does not appear that there
was any ballot-tampering, and that was our concern."
So Cowan offered a sensational and -- by his own
acknowledgement -- wholly irrelevant comparison to the "butterfly ballots
and hanging chads" of the 2000 recount. Then he made a false assertion of
ballots materializing out of thin air, and of unsecured ballots -- an assertion
that seems to have been based entirely on the already-retracted claims of a
Coleman campaign lawyer.
Vieira
concluded the segment by referring to the "mess in Minnesota." But there is no mess. There is simply a recount -- a
recount that does not involve
butterfly ballots or hanging chads,
a recount that, despite the best efforts of Vieira and Cowan to convince us otherwise, has
not a thing in common with the "debacle" in Florida. Just a simple recount.
Today's New York
Times similarly promoted the idea of chaos and impropriety in the Minnesota recount --
without actually providing any evidence or examples. The Times reported:
If Fritz Knaak has his way, Mr. Franken will
never have a shot at solving those problems. A lawyer hired by Mr. Coleman
expressly for the recount, Mr. Knaak described himself as "the new gun
with the shiny pistol." Citing
suspicion over what he called a series of "shenanigans" that have
narrowed Mr. Coleman's lead, he has requested the official
paper tape with the number of ballots and the time stamp printed out by each ballot
machine, in every voting precinct.
The Times gave
no examples of "shenanigans" or any indication of who is
"suspicious" that such "shenanigans" have occurred. Nor
did it give any indication that it asked Knaak for examples of either shenanigans
or suspicion.
Later in the article, the Times
reported:
Mr. Coleman's campaign manager, Cullen
Sheehan, accused the Franken campaign of "a brazen, last minute act of
desperation," by asking Hennepin
County, which includes Minneapolis, to reconsider
461 rejected absentee ballots.
Mr. Franken's
lead lawyer, Marc Elias, called such assertions of ballot stuffing
"fanciful and bogus."
But there were no "assertions of ballot
stuffing" -- none the Times
reported, anyway. The Times
simply quoted Coleman's campaign manager saying the Franken
campaign's request to reconsider previously rejected ballots is an
indication of "desperation." That's quite different from
making an allegation of "ballot stuffing."
Then the Times
reported that Minneapolis Star Tribune
columnist Katherine Kersten expressed concerns about the ability of
Minnesota's Democratic secretary
of state, Mark Ritchie,
to act impartially during the recount, without indicating Kersten's own
political leanings. As Media Matters Senior Fellow Eric Boehlert explained,
"Kersten is a right-winger who smeared
Franken right before Election Day as a 'slanderer of Christianity.' "
Next, the Times
quoted a "Republican researcher" who is "very, very
concerned" about Ritchie. Then it quoted Sean Hannity saying "[f]ishy business" is
occurring in Minnesota,
where Democrats and elections officials are
"up to no good." To what "[f]ishy
business" was Hannity referring? Were his allegations legitimate? The Times did not say.
Finally, the Times
quoted the Facebook status of "Noah Rouen, 34," a Minnesota man on a pheasant hunt who, along
with his friends, "could not help but hatch a conspiracy theory."
If it seems the Times
is desperate to find people concerned about the legitimacy of the Minnesota
recount -- resorting to quoting vague allegations from hard-right partisans
like Sean Hannity and Facebook conspiracy theories -- maybe that's
because Tim Pawlenty, Minnesota's Republican governor, says there is
"no actual evidence that there's been any fraud or problems." (That quote didn't appear in the Times article; maybe it got cut to make room
for the pheasant hunter's Facebook status.) And as Media Matters noted,
the Times did not note that Pawlenty said that the bipartisan state canvassing board Ritchie appointed to oversee the recount was "fair"
and that a lawyer for Coleman's campaign reportedly said that the "state should feel
good about who's on the panel."
The news media's tendency to compare any recount to
the "butterfly ballots and hanging chads" made famous during
Florida's 2000 recount, and to breathlessly report the merest rumor of impropriety,
is not merely lazy and absurd and sensationalist. It is also dangerous. It
causes people to be frightened and concerned about all recounts -- to be wary
of the very concept of recounts.
But recounts needn't be like the "debacle" of 2000; in fact,
they rarely are. They are far more frequently the best way to ensure that
errors in counting do not result in the candidate who received fewer votes
taking office. (Indeed, in 2004, a manual recount in the Washington governor's race reversed the results of the
initial Election Day tabulations and machine recount.) Sensational and baseless
reporting like that produced this week by NBC and The New York Times runs the risk of undermining public confidence in
an essential part of the democratic process.
Jamison Foser is Executive Vice President at Media Matters for America.
Published: Sat, 15 Nov 2008 00:38:07 GMT - Source: Mediamatters.Org - Read the article
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