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Thursday, April 21, 2005

Eric Alterman smacks down Time Magazine
Posted by Jill | 12:15 PM

Eric Alterman's smackdown of Time reporter John Cloud, for the shall we say, act of journalingus the latter performed on Ann Coulter in this week's issue, is truly a beautiful thing to behold:

In response to my comments on his admiring profile of Ann Coulter in which he pronounced her work to be “mostly accurate” based on a casual Google search, available here, Cloud says I am:

the left-wing equivalent of [] Ann Coulter
trying to out-Coulter Coulter
simply insult[ing] him
hid[ing] the fact that it also quotes James Wolcott, Andrew Sullivan, Salon, Ronald Radosh, and even Jerry Falwell criticizing Ann Coulter. She is called everything from an "ideological huckster of hate" in my story to a "skank." I myself say she can be "callous and mouthy," that I want to "shut her up occasionally," that her writing can be "highly amateurish." She is called a "fascist," a "polemicist," and--by Radosh--a virtual McCarthyite.
wants [...] people to ignore Coulter, to pretend as though she doesn't exist and isn't one of the most loved--and hated--figures on the public scene
Made a mistake about a quote of hers in What Liberal Media?
seems most annoyed that we did not use more of his personal "sources" on Ann Coulter
doesn't seem to have done any reporting for his item on me whatsoever
In his interview with CJR Daily interview available here, he adds:

"I think Eric Alterman and Ann Coulter engage in the same kind of debate. They don't often make actual arguments. Instead, they throw names around. This is the point of my article.”

And...

"I think maybe Eric and Ann are in the same bunch. They also, by the way, use the same language."

To take these one by one may appear a bit tiresome and self-serving, but there are larger issues involved, including, admittedly, defending my reputation, but more importantly, having to do with defending the tenets of honest journalism and fair-minded media criticism. So I will, as briefly as I can, engage Cloud on the facts:

Cloud insists that Coulter and I are peas in a pod, guilty of the same sins, up to the same shenanigans. OK, let’s compare me with Ann Coulter. True, we both have B.A.s from Cornell, where we both attended many Dead concerts, (though I don’t pretend I refused to partake in the local customs). More to the point, I went on to earn an M.A. in international relations from Yale and a Ph.D. in U.S. history from Stanford. I’ve written six books, two published by university presses, containing many thousands of footnotes. None of these books have been substantially challenged on the basis of the evidence they employ, even by those who strongly disagree with my arguments. This is not true of Coulter.

I am also a professor of journalism at the City University of New York, a senior fellow of two think tanks, a professional blogger for the most trafficked Internet news site in the world and the media columnist for oldest continuously published weekly magazine in the United States. I am pretty sure none of the above is true of Coulter, either.

What’s more, Coulter has twice either wished for, or joked about the mass murder of American journalists. She has called for, or joked about, the assassination of a sitting American president. She has called for, or joked about, the mass murder of entire populations of Moslem nations. She has referred to the president of the United States and his wife as “pond scum,” among many other things. She has called Christie Todd Whitman a "birdbrain" and a "dimwit"; Jim Jeffords a "half-wit"; and Gloria Steinem a "deeply ridiculous figure" who "had to sleep" with a rich liberal to fund Ms. magazine--all of which makes her "a termagant." I have never called publicly for the death of any one, nor joked about anyone’s murder, nor called any president or any senator any names like those listed above, though I admit, not all of them—including the current president--are among my favorite people.


Cloud is clearly resorting to the standard response to criticism of Ann Coulter, which is that anyone who doesn't worship before the altar of the almighty Jeebus H. Bush is just like Ann Coulter. This particular line is usually reserved for Michael Moore, who, like Alterman, has not advocated the assassination of a sitting American president, mass extermination of entire populations, and has not made fun of a legless American war hero. It's one thing to hoist people on their own petard, as Moore did in Fahrenheit 9/11, which at least uses real video footage of the person being made fun of, as opposed to, as Bill Maher said to Coulter's face, "making shit up," or as I prefer to call it, "pulling stuff out of her ass."

There's a kind of besottedness that comes over American male journalists when writing about Ann Coulter; a recent profile in Esquire had a similar tone. It's not because she's so bee-yoo-tiful, unless you like women with suspiciously large hands and Adam's apples. I suspect it's the same kind of self-loathing proclivity that makes men look for dominatrixes in the personal ads and on the Web, like the hapless husband of Marcia Cross' character on Desperate Housewives. But it's one thing to want to fuck Ann Coulter (and again, I ask, WHY??); it's quite another to do it in public print in a piece you're calling "journalism."

No wonder print journalists are so threatened by bloggers and print film critics are so threatened by onliners. At least if I write a review of a Terence Stamp movie, I'll tell you that I'd pay to watch him shine his shoes for two hours. Perhaps if John Cloud had just said "I wanted to fuck her", we might take him more seriously.

Or maybe not. She IS still pretty skeevey.
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