ABC's Terry Moran began the final segment of Tuesday's "Nightline" saying, "Simply put - a lot of people despise Ann Coulter."
After this disgusting introduction, the first question Dan Harris asked the conservative author was, "Is it ever uncomfortable for you to be hated?" (video follows with transcript and commentary):
TERRY MORAN, HOST: Simply put - a lot of people despise Ann Coulter, the conservative firebrand, because of her malevolent and acid rhetoric. Other people lover her and her creed of liberal villainy. So is it possible to have a conversation with her in which no one gets mad? Well, tonight Dan Harris finds out.
That's quite an introduction. Can you imagine a media member prefacing an interview this way with someone devoutly hated by the right like Michael Moore or Keith Olbermann?
Not likely, right?
Regardless, with the subject's head indelicately placed on the proverbial chopping block, Harris proceeded to whack at it:
DAN HARRIS: Is it ever uncomfortable for you to be hated?
ANN COULTER: [Laughs] That’s a funny question. Not really. Not really.
The slashes continued:
HARRIS: You’ve been called, as you said, a fascist, a lying liar, a tele-bimbo, a skank, a huckster of ideological hate. None of this ever gets to you?
Is this an interview or a beheading? Fortunately, Coulter had a great response:
HARRIS : [Off camera] She says name-calling is a sign of liberal desperation, although she is the one who has been quoted as calling Hillary Clinton “pond scum” and Pamela Harriman, the now deceased U.S. ambassador to France, a “whore.” And that’s not all.
HARRIS: “Taxpayer-supported parasites.” Those are public school teachers.
COULTER: Well, they are.
HARRIS: But, whether you believe it or not, it’s still a name, an epithet. A parasite.
COULTER: Well, sometimes facts are unpleasant things. But someone who lives off the taxpayer is a parasite.
HARRIS: My point is why is it okay when you do it?
COULTER: I don’t think that’s name-calling. I think it is, it is a harshly accurate fact.
And as we know, facts can be very inconvenient things to a liberal media member.
Maybe not as important, the self-fulfilling prophecy intended with this interview should have been obvious to a fifth grader.
You begin with the premise from the host that the guest is hated. Then you have the interviewer second that emotion and seek to further validate it with follow-up questions specifically designed to prove it.
Unfortunately, no one involved asks if their subject would be less hated if they weren't doing everything in their power to demonstrate she is.
Liberal media bias? What liberal media bias?
