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Laura Ingraham (born 1964 in Glastonbury, Connecticut) is an American conservative talk radio host and author.
Career
Ingraham holds a bachelor's degree from Dartmouth College and a Juris Doctor (J.D.) degree from the University of Virginia. During her years at Dartmouth, she wrote for the conservative newspaper The Dartmouth Review.
During the 1980s Ingraham worked as a speechwriter in the Ronald Reagan Administration, and served as a law clerk to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and to Ralph K. Winter on the Second Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals. After clerking, she worked as a white-collar criminal defense attorney for Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom. She appeared on a 1995 cover of The New York Times Magazine in a friend's leopard-skin miniskirt, which she has joked is currently displayed in the Smithsonian, for an article about rising young conservatives.
In the late 1990s, she became a CBS commentator and hosted the program "Watch It!" on MSNBC. She is the author of two books: The Hillary Trap: Looking for Power in All the Wrong Places, which presents Hillary Clinton as an example of the 'traps' women can encounter; and Shut Up & Sing, which decries the 'elitist' views Ingraham attributes to liberals working primarily in entertainment, the media, and academia. According to David Brock, Ingraham had originally struck a deal with Ruth Shalit, at the time a writer for the New Republic, to draft The Hillary Trap for her, but Shalit declined.
Ingraham launched The Laura Ingraham Show in May 2001, which is heard on more than 300 stations and nationwide on SIRIUS Satellite Radio and XM Satellite Radio. The show was originally syndicated by Infinity's (now CBS') Westwood One, but is now syndicated by Talk Radio Network and is broadcast online as well.
The Laura Ingraham Show
According to the fall 2005 issue of Talkers magazine, Ingraham's talk show has the sixth largest audience among nationally heard talk show hosts, trailing only Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Michael Savage, and Howard Stern and Laura Schlessinger. On her web site, law school classmate and friend Lee Habeeb is billed as "co-producer, sidekick, constant irritant" (on May 30th, 2006 Ingraham announced Lee Habeeb had left the show for another job) and Matt Fox is billed as technical producer. Behind the scenes, their guest booking producer is Heather Smith, a former Fox News Channel producer. The site features online polls, "Read It or Weep" articles of note handpicked by Laura from various websites and blogs, and audio clips available via podcasting.
The format of the 3-hour weekday program is host commentary, interaction with Laura and Matt, phone calls, and guests. The show covers primarily politics, pop culture, and media bias, but also covers topics of interest to Laura including race relations, trends in schools, the Middle East, and the legacy of feminism. The show features several recurring segments, each with a different theme of satire.
The segment called "But...Monkey" takes a politician's sound bite and divides the words before "but" from the words that follow with a screeching monkey sound. This is done in order to highlight contradictory statements. This can be taken as a gratuitous pop cultural reference to actor Jim Carrey's Ace Ventura: Pet Detective movie franchise, from which many sound bites are prominently inserted into the show. (Note specifically the prompt for listeners to call in.) Other variations of the monkey cited include the "Having Said That Monkey" and the "Double But...Monkey." Other segments include "Lie of the Day," during which a sound bite is played of an alleged lie over the Anastacia song "Why'd You Lie To Me." Another satirical segment, "Deep Thought of the Day," is signaled by the sounds of piano, smooth flowing water and chirping birds accompanied by a sound file of statements thought to be ridiculous or outrageous. For example, one "Deep Thought" featured on the show was from Maya Angelou, who said "Don't let facts get in the way of the truth. You can tell so many facts you never get to the truth."
Still more segments include "Sound Bite of the Week," which allows callers to choose which of several noteworthy sound 'bites' played before accepting calls is the most outstanding, good or bad. The segment "Looking for Leaders" profiles individuals who have made some outstanding contribution to America by example; one segment featured Kyle Maynard, born without arms or legs, who became a wrestling champion and author. Other lesser-used segments include the "What's He Smokin' Moment of the Day," the "Awkward Pause Moment of the Day," and, recently added, the "Black Helicopter."
The segment "Guess the Guest"--in which callers are encouraged to hypothesize as to the identity of a certain guest on selected episodes of Larry King's CNN show by listening to choice sound cuts from the interview--had been played often on Ingraham's radio show until 2005, when, for no announced reason, Ingraham stopped employing the segment. In 2006 she restarted it, saying she wanted to get back to using "Guess the Guest" on the air. However, Ingraham "messed up" the segment twice in a row after she herself guessed the guest correctly, leaving little to callers' imaginations. She has now prohibited herself from guessing anymore, but sometimes guesses anyway.
Laura visited Iraq from February 5th to February 10th, 2006, leaving the morning of February 11th. The show then featured several interviews and segments with military personnel now serving in Iraq, and she added to her website a daily journal of her trip, which also featured a visit to a nearby hospital.
Personal
In April 2005, Ingraham announced she was engaged to businessman James V. Reyes, with a planned wedding in May or June, 2005. On April 26, 2005, she announced on the air that she had undergone surgery for the treatment of breast cancer. On May 11, 2005, Ingraham told listeners that her engagement to Reyes had been canceled, citing issues regarding her diagnosis with breast cancer. Despite the break-up, she maintains that the two remain good friends. She has told listeners in 2006 that she is now in good health.
Ingraham once was engaged to conservative author Dinesh D'Souza and has dated former United States Senator Robert Torricelli of New Jersey . She is a convert to Catholicism.
Controversies
Views on homosexuality
According to David Brock (in his 2002 book Blinded by the Right), Ingraham, while writing for The Dartmouth Review in the mid-1980s, once attended meetings of a gay student organization for the purpose of publicly outing them in the newspaper. Ingraham secretly taped a meeting of the Gay Students Association, then published the transcript, identifying students by name and calling them "sodomites." According to Ingraham, however, she went to the meetings to report in the newspaper how tuition money was being spent.
Jeffrey Hart, faculty advisor to the Dartmouth Review, later wrote in The Weekly Standard that Ingraham held "the most extreme antihomosexual views imaginable" as an undergraduate, and that she avoided a local restaurant for fear that gay waiters might touch her silverware or spit on her food, exposing her to AIDS.
A decade later, on February 23, 1997, however, Ingraham wrote an essay in the Washington Post in which she announced significant changes in how she views gays and lesbians. This was motivated primarily by the experience of her own gay brother, Curtis Ingraham, as he cared for his ailing partner:
- In the ten years since I learned my brother Curtis was gay, my views and rhetoric about homosexuals have been tempered ... because I have seen him and his companion, Richard, lead their lives with dignity, fidelity and courage.
Concerned Alumni of Princeton
During the January 2006 Supreme Court confirmation hearings for Samuel Alito, Ingraham's short-term employment by the Concerned Alumni of Princeton (also known as CAP) in 1986 became widely known and she mentioned it on the air. Ingraham was the editor of the group's magazine, The Prospect. Her role was also mentioned by Fox News analysts former judge Andrew Napolitano and former senator Zell Miller, and Senator Lindsey Graham, in response to allegations by Senator Edward Kennedy during the hearings that CAP was a group which sought to ban women and minorities from admission into Princeton University, based on an article in The Prospect which was described by CAP as satire. It was later reported that Senator Kennedy, at the time of the hearings, still belonged to a Harvard all-male group called "The Owl Club", with which Harvard had cut ties in 1984 for discriminating against women; this finding led to increased doubt over the validity of the accusations against CAP, and the controversy dissipated.
Statement about Iraq War Media Coverage
On March 21, 2006, Ingraham stirred controversy as a guest on NBC's The Today Show with remarks about coverage of the Iraq conflict by "NBC and networks of the United States":
- To do a show from Iraq means to talk to the Iraqi military, to go out with the Iraqi military, to actually have a conversation with the people instead of reporting from hotel balconies about the latest IEDs going off.
Ingraham's comments followed a six-day visit to Iraq under the protection of U.S. occupation forces, during which she travelled on a Blackhawk helicopter, visited a hospital and several secured villages, and spent nights in the Baghdad Green Zone. In order to tour an Iraqi orphanage Ingraham left the safety of the Green Zone, donned body armor and traveled a route which passed by a large crater created "by a bomb that detonated the night before." During her visit Ingraham also interviewed the mayor of an Iraqi village, members of the Iraqi military, and an Iraqi businesswoman. She also visited a public children's hospital.
Laura Ingraham made the "hotel balconies" comment while Jill Carroll was a hostage, and two months after ABC news anchor Bob Woodruff and cameraman Doug Vogt were seriously injured in an explosion from an IED near Taji, Iraq, about 12 miles north of Baghdad, while travelling with the Iraqi military in an open vehicle. This provoked criticism that Ingraham did not portray the full involvement of the mainstream media reporters in Iraq; she was criticized by Keith Olbermann , Lara Logan , and U.S. Congressman John Conyers, but praised by National Review, and fans of her radio show. Logan, speaking on air from Iraq, voiced that that Ingraham had no validity in criticizing journalists for not being active enough in Iraq when she had not gone there herself, and was told on air that Ingraham had been in Iraq for six days.