We were off to a rocky start—me introducing Coulter with “She’s been called everything from a pundit extraordinaire to a right-wing telebimbo”—and it got rockier from there. We sat across from one another, each in a short black dress with bare, crossed legs and black heels, in mirror-image face-off mode. Coulter rolled out her thesis: that liberals grossly mischaracterize conservatives as a way of silencing them. “It’s all the same lie,” she said, her pin-straight blond hair hanging in sheets on either side of her face as she fixed me with that impassive stare, “which is that conservatives are either stupid or scarily weird, and therefore you don’t have to deal with their ideas.”
Apparently I was a culprit; Coulter claimed I’d tried to blame the savage dragging death of James Byrd Jr., a 49-year-old Black man in Jasper, Texas, on a culture of intolerance fostered by Christian conservatives.
In her defense, I’d misspoken; in the interview she was referring to, with Texas governor Ann Richards, I’d meant to say right-wing extremists. Although I doubt that would have changed things between Coulter and me.
She went on to accuse the Left of name-calling, despite describing Walter Cronkite as “a pious left-wing blowhard” because he’d criticized Moral Majority leader Jerry Falwell for blaming 9/11 on liberals, specifically “the pagans and the abortionists and the feminists and the gays and lesbians…all of them who try to secularize America.”
I asked Coulter if perhaps she should have focused more on Falwell’s incendiary claim than on Cronkite’s reaction.
Her response: “What Jerry Falwell said there, whether you agree with it or not, is fairly standard Jerry Falwell Christian doctrine. Yes, he’s against abortion, he’s against homosexuality—”
“But,” I cut in, “to blame them for the events of September 11th…you don’t find that a bit disconcerting?”
She didn’t and defended Falwell: “What he said was, the Almighty has stopped protecting America because America was no longer asking for God’s help.”
I found that kind of hate-based nonlogic hard to respond to.
Rarely had an interview put me in such a heightened state of alert. Depending on where viewers were coming from, some thought I cleaned Ann’s clock, while others thought she cleaned mine. I’m just glad I was wearing deodorant.
THROUGHOUT MY CAREER, whenever I was in front of the camera, I tried to keep my personal feelings—and my politics—in check. Journalists see things through their own filters. The approach we take, the questions we ask, the sound bites we choose, are all colored by our points of view. As such, I faced a serious conundrum when I asked Ruth Bader Ginsburg what she thought about Colin Kaepernick taking a knee during the national anthem to protest the police killings of Black men.
“I think it’s dumb and disrespectful,” she told me, adding, among other things, that there was no law preventing people from being “stupid” and “arrogant.”
I stiffened. It seemed unworthy of a crusader for equality.
Sure enough, the head of public affairs for the Supreme Court, who’d helped us secure the interview （and who was conveniently married to a friend of mine from high school）， emailed the next day to say the justice had misspoken. Could we please not use that part of the interview?
I was conflicted. Personally, I was a big RBG fan and felt she was an essential counterweight to an increasingly conservative court. But as a journalist, my job was to share her views. I called my friend David Brooks at the New York Times for advice. He thought I should take the comment out, arguing that Ginsburg was elderly and probably didn’t fully understand the question. But when I asked David Westin, the former president of ABC News who had clerked for Justice Lewis Powell, he thought I should keep it in. “She’s on the Supreme Court,” he said. “People should hear what she thinks.”
I ended up splitting the difference, leaving in Ginsburg’s harsh characterization of Kaepernick’s actions but leaving out the following:
“It’s contempt for a government that has made it possible for their parents and their grandparents to live a decent life. Which they probably could not have lived, in the places they came from.…As they become older they realize that this was a youthful folly. And that’s why education is important.”
I lost a lot of sleep over that one and still wrestle with the decision I made. Clearly, this was a blind spot for Ginsburg, and I wanted to protect her. If I’d been interviewing Clarence Thomas or Samuel Alito and they said something guaranteed to embarrass them, would I have granted them the same courtesy?