Know Your Right-Wing Speakers: Michelle Malkin
Friday March 9, 2007
Syndicated battle-axe Michelle Malkin is best known for her “seemingly mean-spirited” rants and tendency toward the fallacious. This unlikely graduate of the left-leaning Oberlin College has been criticized for her oft-unfounded and almost always sensationalist columns, which now run in about 200 newspapers across the country, as well as her appearances as a commentator for the “Fair and Balanced” cable network.
 Infamous for defending the United States government’s internment of Japanese Americans during World War II and suggesting that today’s Arab Americans deserve the same fate, Malkin made waves at the March 2007 Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC); she was caught on video running away from Nation magazine writer Max Blumenthal, who asked her to autograph a photo of interred Japanese-Americans. And in February 2007, Malkin was a main instigator of events that led to the “resignation” of Amanda Marcotte and Melissa McEwan, two feminist bloggers hired by the John Edwards presidential campaign. Aside from posting several rants criticizing Marcotte for her “foul-mouthed nutroots diatribes,” Malkin starred in a bawdy, overwrought reenactment of Marcotte’s writings on her v-blog. The Edwards brouhaha landed Malkin some prime journalistic real estate when Washington Post media columnist Howard Kurtz wrote a somewhat sympathetic profile of the “hard right” Malkin.
No stranger to tasteless videos before the Marcotte soliloquy, Malkin’s slideshow of Islamic violence, “First, They Came,” which seemed designed to exacerbate anti-Muslim hysteria, was banned in October 2006 by YouTube due to its “inappropriate nature,” leading to the “inappropriate” flagging of her “Conservative YouTube” group.
Malkin, who has made it her business to relentlessly “criticize the MTV generation’s morally deprived icons,” began her super-conservative punditry career in newspaper journalism in 1992 at the Los Angeles Daily News, where she spent two years as an editorial writer and weekly columnist. Next she joined the editorial board of the Seattle Times, where she continued to pen editorials and weekly columns for three and a half years.
More recently, Malkin signed on to co-host one of Fox News’ lame attempts at ensnaring a younger, hipper audience with “It’s Out There,” a show recapping various news stories from the blogoshpere. Kirsten Powers, a centrist former Clinton administration official, acts as Malkin’s co-host and supposed counter-balance.
Despite its overt attempts to be “fair and balanced,” including a segment titled “Left Hook, Right Hook,” both hosts fail to mention any left-leaning blogs by name. The future of the show is uncertain, as neither host has mentioned it on their own blogs and Fox currently has no other air dates scheduled.
Malkin, the author of three books, received a lot of heat for her 2004 screed, a revisionist history titled In Defense of Internment: The Case for ‘Racial Profiling’ in World War II and the War on Terror. In it she uses weak arguments and evidence to claim that the U.S. government’s imprisonment of Japanese Americans and other ethnic Japanese in internment camps during World War II was justified.
The book created uproar among historians, scholars, and Japanese Americans. The Historians’ Committee for Fairness, an organization of scholars and professional researchers, charged that Malkin’s book represents "a blatant violation of professional standards of objectivity and fairness." Eric Muller, a University of North Carolina Law Professor and member of the Historians’ Committee for Fairness, suggested the true intent of Malkin’s research was to create a haphazard list of excuses for the Bush administration’s internment of thousands in Guantánamo Bay and elsewhere.
Malkin has since published an errata, or confession of factual errors in the book.
During the 2004 election, Malkin declared herself a member of the “security moms,” the demographic of women who base a wide range of their political opinions on protecting themselves and their families from an impending terrorist attack. Malkin seemed to invoke her “security mom” lens as the justification for her far right-wing ideas on racial profiling, border security, gun ownership, and other issues.
Malkin is also known for her appearance on MSNBC’s “Hardball,” where she said there were “legitimate questions” regarding whether one of John Kerry’s Vietnam wounds was self-inflicted. Host Chris Matthews proceeded to ask Malkin 11 times if she was suggesting that Kerry wounded himself, but Malkin refused to answer. On her blog, Malkin also attacked Matthews’ MSNBC colleague Keith Olbermann for allegedly calling her “an idiot.” Olbermann writes on his blog that he felt terrible and was preparing a formal apology, but after checking the tape of the show and re-reading the blog, he found he had “never called Michelle Malkin an ‘idiot’, never used the word.” Added Olbermann, “She’s an author or a journalist or something, and she misquoted the insult to herself.”
Malkin remains adamant in her defense of Japanese internment and maintains a page on her personal blog entitled “Subversives,” listing “ethnic Japanese … who engaged in subversive activities.” Her contentious blog posts, which feature tirades on topics from immigration to rap music, have made her a hot topic in the blogging world. One favorite is the Malkin Media Diversity Test, which is the set of conservative litmus test questions she wants to send to journalists to demonstrate their supposed liberal bias.
In Malkin’s latest book, Unhinged: Exposing Liberals Gone Wild, released in October 2005, she documents the hypocrisy and lunacy of her favorite target, liberals. Malkin’s goal is “turning MSM conventional wisdom on its head and showing that the standard caricature of conservatives as angry/racist/bigoted/violence-prone crackpots is a much better description of today’s unhinged liberals than of us.” For a look at some of these crackpots, check out her clever Unhinged Mugshot collection, which allegedly provides the evidence for her thesis: Sometimes people commit crimes, and sometimes these people are liberals. Thus, liberals are angry/racist/bigoted/violence-prone crackpots. The best part, though, is when you scroll down and realize that none of her examples are elected prominent officials, popular columnists, or anyone else who can fairly be described as having many liberal adherents. They’re just regular folks arrested at protests and the like. Malkin, apparently, thinks that all liberals ought to be held responsible for the actions of a few obscure people who share their party registration or opposition to the Iraq War. Her less-than-witty prose grows tiresome relatively quickly as she points out the hypocrisy and insanity of the American left with such zingers as “it’s not conservatives producing a bullet-riddled bumper crop of assassination-themed musicals, books, and collectible stamps.”
Malkin also made headlines in December 2005 when, in her syndicated column, she criticized the “Associated Press, NBC News correspondent Andrea Mitchell, and others in the Bush-bashing press corps” for “accus[ing] the White House and 10 soldiers from the Army’s 42nd Infantry Division of ‘staging’” a now infamous October 13, 2005, video conference in which Bush spoke with soldiers stationed in Iraq. According to Malkin, NBC News was “indulging in its Bush-deranged feeding frenzy” over what Malkin asserted was a totally impromptu and genuine conversation. Perhaps NBC made such assumptions because the preparations for the event, in which soldiers were told what they would be asked and coached on their answers by administration officials before the president arrived were accidentally transmitted to reporters via a live satellite feed.
As one blogger dedicated to tracking Malkin’s blogs and columns wrote shortly after Malkin came into public view following the events of 9/11, “Get to know this one because it won’t be long before she takes up the Ann Coulter/Pat Buchanan mantle as one of the most rabid hate-mongers in the country today.”
-updated by Kathleen Burkhardt, Hope College
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Comments
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Your article maliciously mischaracterizes Malkin, her views, and her intellect.
Must she agree with Campus Progress? In general, does Campus Progress tolerate criticism and dissent? Does Campus Progress promote, foster, or even entertain intellectual diversity? Does Campus Progress ever consider alternate, well-supported, viewpoints?
— Simon - Apr 25, 10:25 PM - #Does any of that apply to Michelle Malkin?
— Nimrod Gently - May 11, 03:35 PM - #I don’t think “Simon” has seen/read/heard much of Malkin. If he had, he would agree with the entire article. I have found her to be a nasty, ill-informed, publicity seeking little twit. I believe she and the equally inept Ann Coulter came out of the same gene pool. No one should fine dissent unacceptable, its the total lack of what she’s talking about that is difficult to take.
— Judy Brownrigg - Aug 25, 05:07 PM - #