Lying Liar

Here we see a quick, blatant lie–but nuanced enough that we should walk through it slowly. Franken falsely claimed that Ann Coulter “makes shit up,” citing this example: From page 134 of Slander: “Even during the media’s nightly flogging of Iran-Contra, Reagan’s approval ratings fell only 5 percentage points, from 80 percent to 75 percent.” Her (read more...)

Ann Coulter correctly noted in her book Slander that the New York Times did not report controversial statements of Jessse Jackson in 1994 comparing U.S. conservatives to Nazis but Al Franken changes the context of what she said to single out only her statement “The New York Times did not report the speech” and use (read more...)

Franken claims that “to show just how much the media elite hates Christians,” Ann Coulter attributed certain anti-Christian statements to The New York Times. Franken argues that the Times was not actually saying those things–they were quoting other people and doing book reviews. Of course, Coulter never claimed anyone should credit the Times with those statements. (read more...)

Franken falsely accuses Ann Coulter of having “totally misrepresented” a source. On page 118… she writes that when the media consortium study on the 2000 Florida vote was released, it showed “that Bush had won on any count.” But the Washington Post story she cites says that the “Study Finds Gore Might Have Won Statewide Tally (read more...)

This time, Franken steals Coulter’s context and uses it to accuse her of lying to her readers. This is Franken, thinking he has gotten away with it: Early in the book she writes: ‘New York Times columnist Frank Rich demanded that Ashcroft stop monkeying around with Muslim terrorists and concentrate on anti-abortion extremists.’ Except he didn’t. In (read more...)

Franken takes two Coulter quotes out of context, trying to make her look inconsistent. He introduces this distortion with And what really burns Coulter is that, in the fawning liberal media, Then he quotes Coulter as follows: Jim Jeffords’s degree from Yale cannot be cited often enough. (And consider that Jeffords got into Yale long before the terrorizing (read more...)

Franken’s first specific example of Ann Coulter supposedly using endnotes to “lie” involves the allegation of running together sentences to look as though one person has said something when a different person actually said it. Franken not only used this example in his book but at BookExpo America in 2003, where he said: I write a chapter (read more...)

Franken accuses Ann Coulter of lying by using endnotes instead of footnotes. According to Franken, it is dishonest because “endnotes are much harder to reference.” In other words, according to Franken’s hypothesis, endnotes hide information where no one will ever find it. In reality, it is rare for an author to document their facts as extensively (read more...)