Laura Ingraham didn't waste any time getting into it with NBC's Matt Lauer, on Monday's Today, as the conservative talk show host and author took Lauer, his colleague George Lewis and MSNBC to task for their slanted reporting of Sarah Palin and the tea party. After a Lewis set-up piece, in which the reporter asked if Palin gets "people too riled up?" Ingraham, in her interview with Lauer, charged him with bias: "How do you go from Sarah Palin giving a speech to saying did she rile up the people too much and then talk about death threats? I think that kind of reporting, really is what drives people crazy about the dinosaur media." Lauer countered that "some people" have noted that Palin's "comments" and "graphics" have "incited some people." Later on in the interview Lauer claimed Palin was "polarizing" to which Ingraham, citing low approval ratings for Obamacare, fired back at Lauer: "Well I think that, if you want to look at polarizing people right now, I wouldn't look at Palin, I'd look at Barack Obama."
Finally Lauer, making his best attempt at being balanced, asked if there was too much "vitriol" and "intimidation" from both sides. Ingraham acknowledged that "folks get angry" on from the right and left, but then slammed MSNBC for stoking that vitriol as she threw back at Lauer: "We have people on, frankly, your cable channel saying really hateful things about conservative commentators and politicians".