A "minefield" of hatemongering

Colorado Media Matters finds "Gunny" Bob's most recent book is filled with factual distortions, ethnic smears, inflammatory attacks, and an affinity for "destruction and carnage"

May 22, 2007 (Denver) -- Colorado Media Matters has released its comprehensive review of Newsradio 850 KOA host "Gunny" Bob Newman's latest book, Minefields to Microphones: Global Asymmetric Warfare, the Radical Left, and Winning the War on Terror, in which it discovered a veritable "minefield" of factual distortions, ethnic smears, and inflammatory attacks on liberals and others. Not surprisingly, Minefields to Microphones -- Newman's 21st book -- reflects the tone of his show, which recently lost some of its advertisers following Newman's bigoted remarks about Muslim immigrants and his call for a law eliminating some of their basic civil rights.

Colorado Media Matters has documented numerous instances in which Newman has promoted conservative falsehoods; smeared Democrats, progressives, and Muslims; and made outlandish, unsubstantiated accusations on his show. In Minefields to Microphones, published by Boulder-based Paladin Press and released in September 2006, Newman stayed true to form. He is scheduled to release his next book, The War for America: Liberal Extremism, Moral Turpitude, and High Crimes and Misdemeanors (Cumberland House Publishing), in June.

Excerpts from Colorado Media Matters' analysis of Minefields to Microphones:

"[H]ate-filled" human-rights organizations

Calling the global human-rights groups Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch "hate-filled, anti-freedom organizations," Newman writes, "For those people who hate America, the next time you are digging a mass grave that you and your family will soon be thrown into after a shot to the back of the head, give Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch a jingle. I'm sure they'll be right over to save you."

"There's nothing so clarifying as standing among hundreds of dead bodies"

Newman's book includes numerous laudatory references to carnage, killing, and bloodshed, both on and off the battlefield. Newman writes on page 209, "There's nothing so clarifying as standing among hundreds of dead bodies." He elaborates by explaining that he stood among dead bodies twice -- once in 1983 when 241 U.S. Marines died in the embassy bombing in Beirut "and the second time in Kuwait on the Highway to Hell, where hundreds of Iraqi soldiers paid the ultimate price for their crimes against humanity in a grisly, miles-long jumble of mangled vehicles on the road between Kuwait City and Basra." Newman continues, "Sometimes nightmares of the Beirut bodies haunt me, but the Highway to Hell bodies never invade my sleep, I suppose because the latter were scum-sucking bottom feeders who got what was coming to them."

Newman also criticizes (page 120) prominent Iraq war critic and decorated combat veteran U.S. Rep. John Murtha (R-PA):

"Furious Marines from wars as far back as World War II are spitting mad at the cowardly colonel [Murtha] and many want his head on a stake in the middle of the Marines Corps Commandant's lawn. Personally, I would not soil that good earth with so disgusting and despicable a piece of offal."

Liberals are "professional, unrepentant hate mongers"

Throughout his book, Newman resorts to the same hyperbolic and baseless accusations used by other conservative pundits to imply that liberals and Democrats are unpatriotic, treasonous, aligned with terrorists, and opposed to democracy in Iraq. Examples include:

Page 14: "Arabs with rights are a liberal's worst nightmare."

Page 225: "The liberals really hate it when U.S. military action removes a maniacal, genocidal savage like Hussein and brutal regimes like the Taliban."

Page 240: "Dimwitted diplomats, Democrat dandies, and limp-wristed liberals must be made to understand that, to win this war on terror, we must abandon their kinder, gentler, politically correct, overly sensitive approach to dealing with our foes and go straight for the jugular with the sharpened edge of an extended entrenching tool."

To read the complete Colorado Media Matters analysis, click here.