Jack Shafer poses a good question over at Slate today. Unfortunately, while the headline, “Our Ann Coulter Problem. Why the Press Won’t Just Ignore Her”, suggests he supplies an answer, he doesn’t. Other than the talk radio crowd who eerily echo the notorious line, “Coulter has some good ideas”, (Like what? Blowing up the New York Times?) — everyone else who has watched Coulter’s career arc has to have asked themselves, “Why?”
As in, “Why is this rude, unmodulated, and not particularly insightful shock-jock-style pundit given so much airtime?”
My old pal, David Carr, of the Times, had it as right as anyone when he suggested Coulter wouldn’t get past security at The Today Show and CNN if it weren’t for the blonde-in-a-cocktail dress bit. (The reverse logic there being that Matt Lauer and everyone else might have had a few more chats with, say, the late Molly Ivins, if Ivins lost 40 pounds, 20 years and made friendly wih a bottle of peroxide).
Let me suggest … again … (as in “yet again”) … that the media’s problem with Coulter is two-fold, maybe three-fold.
One: The mainstream media lives in a state of constant, palpable, dry-mouthed fear of being targeted by right-wing partisans. To be called out as a “liberal” is to be on a slippery slope to getting Dan “Rathered”, where a stupendous network of resources comes to bear on you with such constancy and virulence it becomes nearly impossible to do anything — like “normal journalism” — other than rebut crackpot criticism and invective. In order to blunt this very high potentiality, mainstream media news entities and performers make extraordinary concessions to personalities who embody the far-far-right ethos. It is a way of indemnifying themselves.
Two: Mainstream television and radio news — and I use the word “news” very advisedly in the context of commercial radio, since it barely exists anymore — is entertainment, first, second, third and foremost. That means glamour of a fairly cliched variety is a primary criteria for access to the network camera. With that in mind, rail thin blondes in short cocktail dresses — often at 8 in the morning(?) — are inherently more viable as guests than say some middle-aged gal like Ivins, or nerdy-looking wonky characters like, um, David Sirota or Glenn Greenwald, neither of whom I recall ever being asked on to chat up Lauer, Diane Sawyer or whoever is doing that CBS show these days.
Third: Coulter can be relied on to make “news”. She will, invariably insult, vilify and engage in reckless hyperbole. Its guaranteed. Its like booking a barking seal. Her willingness to spew over-the-top invective of a sort that were she a guy in a bar would get her nose broken, is fundamental to her appeal to mainstream infotainment. Its part of an unwritten contract. “We’ll have you on, and you say something — anything, we don’t care — just as long as it is ‘hot’ enough that every other network has to pick it up and run it. Cross-promotion, baby! Its how you play the game.”
The direct link between Coulter and the latest absurdist celebrity overreach — Anna Nicole Smith — is almost too obvious to note. (Carl Hiassen whacks his press colleagues for their Anna Nicole frenzy in his Miami Herald column.) Where Smith could be relied upon to behave like the siliconized trailer trash she was every time a camera turned in her direction, Coulter can be relied upon to give voice to the worst instincts of the country’s most angry, ill-informed yet active media watchdogs … and be blonde the whole time she is doing it.
The solution? As an old altar boy, I place great faith in the cumulative power of shame. Enough citizen-viewers e-mailing the Matt Lauers or Charlie Gibsons of the world, or standing up during one of their barnstorming tours and asking, “the Ann Coulter question”, will eventually diminish her appeal. Cable news, even more desperate than network morning shows for sick-to-dead blondes to hold their audience, will take a lot longer to shame. And even then Coulter will be replaced … probably by something worse.
My God! What if Coulter used her book royalties to buy herself an Anna Nicole boob job? MSNBC would give her her own show.
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