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Ann Coulter: 'Outrageously' Successful
In the 48 hours after Ann Coulter's comments bashing [a select group of] Sept. 11 widows hit the airwaves last week, searches for her name on Yahoo rocketed by 2300 percent. Protests came from Hillary Clinton, the 9/11 commission, New York's governor and Fox host Bill O'Reilly. Her new book shot to No. 1 on Amazon.com, where it remains.
For those who practice the art of outrageousness, there seems little downside to upping the ante - that's what their audiences want and expect. In other words, the old adage pretty much holds: There's no such thing as bad publicity.
In case anyone missed it, the furor centered on Coulter's remarks about four women who lost their husbands at the World Trade Center and later became active in public, pushing for the creation of the Sept. 11 commission investigating the attacks and supporting Sen. John Kerry for president.
"These broads are millionaires, lionized on TV and in articles about them, reveling in their status as celebrities and stalked by grief-arrazies," the conservative pundit writes in "Godless: The Church of Liberalism," released last Tuesday. "I've never seen people enjoying their husbands' deaths so much." Later, she adds: "And by the way, how do we know their husbands weren't planning to divorce these harpies?"
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Some wondered aloud: Had Coulter gone off the deep end? Others saw it as a well-honed marketing strategy. What's clear, though, is that Coulter had an image to sustain. In this age of the blogosphere, 24-hour cable TV and talk radio, it takes a lot to rise above the din. And when you've made a name based on being outrageous, you need to keep it up.
"There's something about the momentum of sustaining a reputation based on noise," says cultural critic Roger Rosenblatt of Time magazine. "Someone like Coulter, in order to sustain the reputation that she's forged for herself, is likely to think 'What can I say now?' Eventually, how insulting can you get?"
Although Coulter is a unique package - the long blond hair, the little black dresses, the ideas delivered rapid-fire with stunning self-confidence - there are certainly others who have thrived via the art of outrageousness.
On the airwaves, Rush Limbaugh has been criticized for his comments on blacks, on feminists, on gays and, of course, liberals. Recently, he called the black student making rape accusations against Duke lacrosse players a "ho"; he later apologized. He's called feminists "femi-Nazis," and used the sound effect of a vacuum cleaner on his show to simulate abortion.
There's Howard Stern, the hugely popular "shock jock" (and best-selling author) whose material led to $1.7 million in FCC fines before he moved to satellite radio in January. Stern favors sexual and scatological talk and once prayed on air that the prostate cancer suffered by an FCC nemesis would spread to his lungs and kidneys - "that was me being outrageous," he was quoted as saying later. Last month, he was named one of Time magazine's 100 most influential people.
On the left, filmmaker Michael Moore, the Oscar-winning director of "Fahrenheit 9/11," is a particular target of conservatives for his no-holds-barred attacks on President Bush. MSNBC host Tucker Carlson calls him "actually worse than Ann Coulter, because she actually makes arguments you can rebut." And Air America radio host Al Franken _ author of the not-so-subtly titled "Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot" and "Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right" - is hardly a favorite of conservatives either.
"A patient, thoughtful, analytical person is made invisible in this world of sustained screaming," says Herron, a professor at Wayne State University. Nowadays, he says, you need to be "an ideologue with a very nice haircut." Or, perhaps, with long blond hair and a little black dress.
For those who practice the art of outrageousness, is ANY publicity bad publicity?
"Pretty much no, apart from a perp walk and a guilty verdict," says Jeff Jarvis, author of the BuzzMachine blog.
"That's the way the media world works now. You can write a book, say something outrageous, it gets picked up, and if you get attacked, well, that's what you WANT," Jarvis says. "'Please attack me' - it's the no-shame approach."
Coulter, who did not respond to the AP's request for comment, hasn't always been rewarded for her provocative persona - she was dropped by the National Review for anti-Muslim statements after Sept. 11 and by USA Today at the 2004 Democratic National Convention for describing the women in attendance as "hippie-chick pie wagons" (the long version was worse.)
But, of course, the utterings that got her in trouble did much to keep her in the public eye - and ring up better book sales.
Jarvis notes that the media plays a role by perpetuating outrageous statements, as many have pointed out in the past week.
If the media keeps reflexively quoting statements like those on the Sept. 11 widows, Jarvis says, "we become complicit in the little schemes" of those who make them.
"It's a hard line to draw," he says, "but it is not our job to be used."
© 2006 Associated Press.
Get Ann Coulter's new book "Godless: The Church of Liberalism," as part of this "outrageous" deal with NewsMax magazine. Click Here.
Editor's note:
Read more on this subject in related Hot Topics: Inside Cover Stories |
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