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Slander: Liberal Lies About the American Right (view source)
Revision as of 16:44, May 5, 2007
, 16:44, May 5, 2007no edit summary
She blames liberals for the fact that American political debate has become increasingly hostile, overly personal, and insufferably trivial. Some have quarrelled with the choices of words she has had for certain politicians and commentators, such as [[John Howard]].
She blames liberals for the fact that American political debate has become increasingly hostile, overly personal, and insufferably trivial. Some have quarrelled with the choices of words she has had for certain politicians and commentators, such as [[John Howard]].
Slander was also criticized for being riddled with factual errors, one of the most well known being the following passage from the first edition:
“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!” (page 205, Slander, First Edition)
In fact, as many commentators pointed out, the New York Times, like most American newspapers, covered Earnhardt’s death on its front page the day after he was killed, in an article beginning “Stock car racing's greatest current star and one of its most popular and celebrated figures, Dale Earnhardt, crashed and was killed today." Her “correction” in the paperback edition removes the sentence “It took the New York Times two days to deem Earnhardt’s name sufficiently important to mention it on the first page,” but the passage still strongly implies that the NYT didn’t cover Earnhardt’s death until three days later.
Among the other inaccuracies were Coulter’s claim that “In 1993 [[Al Gore]] saw busts of Washington and Franklin and asked, ‘Who are these guys?’ The story was carried only by [[USA Today.]]” (in fact, the account had been repeated in several papers, including the New York Times, and Al Gore was referring not to busts of Washington and Franklin, but to busts of John Paul Jones and Marquis de Lafayette) and her reference to “[[Katie Couric]], berating [[Arlen Specter]] about [[Anita Hill]] ten years after the hearings. . ." when in fact, this “berating” consisted of Couric asking Specter a single question about a discussion of the [[Clarence Thomas]] hearings in his upcoming book where he accused Anita Hill of ‘flat out perjury.’”
[[category:book]]
[[category:book]]