11. On Page 48, Coulter suggested that The New York Times' news reporting was biased against former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani (R). Coulter wrote:
As the New York Times admitted in one of the rare articles during the nineties not calling Giuliani an "authoritarian,"36 "[W]hile constituting less than 3 percent of the country's population," New York City alone "was responsible for 155,558 of the 432,952 fewer reported crimes over the three years."
In her endnote for that passage, Coulter listed three editorials. On page 48, however, she claimed they were "articles," and that the Times often referred to Giuliani as "authoritarian." Additionally, one of the editorials Coulter pointed to, "The Legal Aid Crisis" (subscription required), from October 5, 1994, read as follows:
Mayor Rudolph Giuliani's retaliatory cancellation of the Legal Aid Society's contract with the city at first looked authoritarian and even dangerous at a time when he is urging the police to crowd the courts with more defendants.
But Mr. Giuliani's action has a firm foundation in fiscal reality. The city faces a big budget deficit. Public-employee unions are being told they cannot have raises. It follows then that the legal professionals who already cost the city $79 million a year should know that this is not a year for negotiating the 4.5 percent raise they are demanding.
Therefore, on top of referring to editorials as "articles," Coulter highlighted a Times editorial that said Giuliani "looked authoritarian," but actually wasn't.
As for her claim that the first article she cited was "one of the rare articles during the nineties not calling Giuliani an 'authoritarian' "; in order for it to be true, it would have to be the case that, at the very least, a majority, if not an overwhelming majority, of the literally thousands of articles The New York Times published during the 1990s that mentioned Giuliani also referred to him as "authoritarian." Yet she managed to identify only two editorials that did so.
Coulter also used the wrong date for the editorial "Mr. Giuliani's Energetic First Year," dating it November 25, 1997, in the endnote. According to Nexis, this article was published on January 3, 1995.
12. On Page 67, Coulter attacked the "mainstream media" for being biased against former President George H.W. Bush during his 1988 presidential campaign against former Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis. Coulter wrote:
Despite being sentenced on two consecutive life terms, [Donald] Robertson was released under Michael Dukakis's furlough program after only eight years in prison. He never came back. Bradford Boyd was serving time for rape when he committed first-degree murder in prison. Still, he was furloughed. While out on furlough, he viciously beat a man, repeatedly raped a woman, and then killed himself. (On the plus side of the ledger, Boyd hasn't committed any crimes since then.) The mainstream media didn't find these stories, [Cliff] Barnes [victim of convicted murderer William Horton] did. They were too busy writing articles about Bush "Slinging Mud on the Low Road to Office,"2 and "Republicans Riding to Victory on Racism,"3 and "Bush Tactics Turn Ugly."4 According to the vast majority of media stories on the 1988 presidential campaign, it was an 'ugly' tactic for the Bush campaign to mention the Massachusetts furlough program.
Once again, Coulter was not citing news articles, but opinion pieces that she falsely claimed were "articles." Coulter cited three op-eds to support her claim about what the mainstream media were "too busy" doing -- a November 4, 1988, Newsday column by Mary McGrory; an October 31, 1988, Financial Post (Toronto) column by Allan Fotheringham; and an October 30, 1988, Newsday column by Murray Kempton, respectively. Moreover, the McGrory column was published three days after the 1988 election, and the Fotheringham column was published in a Canadian paper -- which raises doubts as to how much effect they could have had on the Bush campaign or the American electoral scene.
As for her claim that "the vast majority of media stories on the 1988 presidential campaign" alleged that "it was an 'ugly' tactic for the Bush campaign to mention the Massachusetts furlough program," she offered no citation at all, though from her use of quotes one would assume she meant that, in more than 50 percent of the stories written or aired by the media during the 1988 campaign, the Bush campaign's use of the Massachusetts furlough program was both discussed and referred to with the word "ugly." This is plainly false.
13. On Page 211, Coulter falsely attributed the quote, "[t]he probability of life originating at random is so utterly minuscule as to make it absurd," to Francis Crick, co-discoverer of DNA's double-helix structure, for which he received the Nobel Prize in 1962; however, the quote actually belongs to Fred Hoyle, a British mathematician and astronomer.
14. On Page 49, Coulter repeated the long-since debunked claim that former President Bill Clinton turned down an offer from the Sudanese government to hand over Osama bin Laden to the United States in 1996. Coulter wrote:
To this day, Democrats demand that we credit Clinton for the plunging crime rate in the nineties -- which did not begin to plunge until Giuliani became mayor of New York. Clinton may have tried to socialize health care, presided over a phony Internet bubble, spurned Sudan when it offered him Osama bin Laden on a silver platter,39 sold a burial plot in Arlington cemetery to a campaign contributor, engaged in sex romps in the Oval Office, been credibly accused of rape by Juanita Broaddrick, obstructed justice, had his law license suspended and gotten himself permanently disbarred from the U.S. Supreme Court, and pardoned a lot of sleazy crooks in return for political donations on his way out of office -- but, we're told, at least he was terrific on crime!
Coulter's endnote quoted two articles from October 2001 -- one from the Associated Press and one from The Guardian. However, as the portions Coulter quoted in her endnote indicated, neither article in any way lent support to her claim that Clinton rejected an offer from Sudan to turn over bin Laden. From Coulter's endnote [emphasis added]:
See, e.g., Jennifer Loven, "Clinton Says Answer to Terrorism is Support of Current Administration," Associated Press, October 10, 2001. ("Clinton also confirmed a failed U.S. attempt in 1996 to have Osama bin Laden arrested in Sudan and placed in Saudi Arabian custody and a CIA-sponsored plan to have Pakistani commandos hunt him down in 1999, abandoned after a military coup there. Bin Laden is the prime suspect in last month's terrorist attacks on New York and Washington.") Michael Ellison, "Attack on Afghanistan," The Guardian (London), October 11, 2001. ("Mr. Clinton confirmed in a speech to executives at the Kennedy Centre in Washington DC that the US had failed in 1996 to have Bin Laden arrested in Sudan and that a CIA-sponsored initiative to have Pakistani commandos snare him three years later was abandoned because of a military coup in that country. A US cruise missile attack on Bin Laden training camps in Afghanistan in 1998 missed their main target.")
Of course, the reason neither of the articles supported Coulter's claim is that, according to the 9-11 Commission, there is "no reliable evidence to support" the allegation that Clinton was even offered bin Laden by the Sudanese government, as Media Matters has documented. This claim first surfaced in an August 11, 2002, article on right-wing news website NewsMax that distorted a speech Clinton made in 2002. The 9-11 Commission found that Clinton "wrongly recount[ed] a number of press stories he had read," and had "misspoken" in his 2002 speech.
Conclusion
Media Matters' analysis of the endnotes in Godless revealed that Coulter routinely misrepresented the information of her sources, as well as omitted inconvenient information within those same sources that refuted her claims. Coulter relied upon secondary sources to support many of her claims, as well as unreliable or outdated information.
In addition to demonstrating her poor scholarship, this analysis also made clear Coulter's lack of respect for her readers, who she clearly assumed would believe anything she wrote, as long as there was a citation attached to it.
Following the publication of Slander, similar errors in the book's scholarship were documented. Just as Ross defended Godless by pointing to the book's endnotes, so did Coulter in defending Slander in 2002.
On June 26, 2002, Coulter appeared on MSNBC's Hardball with Chris Matthews and stated, "I have footnotes. I do back this up." The very next day, on CNN's now-defunct Crossfire, Coulter quipped, "I wrote a book [Slander], you know, thousands of facts, studies, quotes -- 35 pages of footnotes ..." On July 15, 2002, Coulter was a guest on Fox News' Hannity & Colmes. Co-host Sean Hannity asked Coulter, "How many pages of footages" in Slander? Coulter replied:
con't...
