Media

30 Pages 7521 Words

ces on the Lexis databases—a huge number by any reckoning—during the ten preceding years.) Since its publication there has been little chance of avoiding her. The passage above appeared under the imprint of Crown Publishers, a division of Random House, whose release of Slander with a substantial marketing budget and nationwide promotion marked Coulter’s escape from the right-wing ghetto of Regnery Publishing.
Slander rolled out on the Today show, whose anchor Katie Couric is compared in its pages to Hitler’s mistress. That triumph of tasteful merchandising was followed by a live shot on ABC’s Good Morning America, a dozen appearances on the NBC cable affiliates (including eight Hardball dates), five on CNN (of which four were on Crossfire in prime time), at least six on Fox News, plus reams of reviews, interviews, and profiles in nearly every American publication, supplemented by endless hours of radio chat. (Obviously, Coulter’s success also owes much to her charm, sophistication, and personal warmth. Of her gracious host Couric, the author later said, “I think that a lot of people really hate her, and I was just the first one to pop her.”)
Where is the evidence that liberals in the media have tried to suppress Coulter’s ideas or the primitive emotions that she presents as ideas? Even left-leaning Phil Donahue, who hosted her on his MSNBC show (since canceled), felt obliged to wish her well in the most obsequious terms. “God bless her,” he said a few weeks later. “I hope she makes a zillion dollars and the book flies out of the store, which apparently it is.”
In fact, the “liberal media” as defined by Coulter provide her with abundant opportunities to promote herself and her writing. But there have been two well-documented schemes to deprive Coulter of an audience. In both cases, the villains who tried to silence her were affiliated with right-wing institutions.
HarperCollins, the publishing subsid...