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The Times Gets Its Grand Theory on Ann Coulter All Wrong
Times Watch ^ | October 11, 2010 | Clay Waters

Posted on 10/12/2010 12:43:11 PM PDT by Conservative Coulter Fan

On Sunday, the Times put two controversial conservative women on the front of two of their sections, blogger Pamela Geller, and author and commentator Ann Coulter.

Coulter was profiled on the front of the Sunday Styles section under the headline “Not Done Yet.” The thrust of that odd headline became clear in the subhead, which put a cynical spin on Coulter’s recent pronouncements: “Increasingly outflanked on the right by the Tea party, the conservative columnist Ann Coulter is trotting out a new image and seeking support in some unlikely places.”

For a right-wing, evangelical Christian who has made fun of homosexuals and opposes same-sex marriage, Ms. Coulter seemed awfully...game. Wearing a black lace-up cocktail dress and high black heels, she posed for a photograph with the founder of Boy Butter, a maker of sex lubricants.

Reporter Laura Holson, while not actively hostile toward Coulter personally (at least not the way the Times' tag-team  of Anne Barnard and Alan Feuer treated anti-Ground Zero mosque blogger Geller), did inaccurately portray Coulter  as acting out of opportunism:

Now that members of the Tea Party movement have stolen much of her thunder, Ms. Coulter is taking some surprising new positions. She called the decision to send more troops into Afghanistan "insane," warning that it could be a new Vietnam. She has decried fellow Republicans for continuing to insist President Obama is Muslim. And perhaps most startling, she wants to bring more gay Republicans into the conservative fold.

But as Coulter friend and neo-liberal blogger Mickey Kaus (now at Newsweek) proved, none of the positions Holson flagged are new ones for Coulter, and she's been a guest speaker at the very Tea Party groups that have supposedly eclipsed her. Kaus concluded:

Holson's "opportunism" theory might strike some as a sleazy and condescending attempt to discredit a conservative figure whose views are more sensible...than the New York Times, whose reputation for avoiding dumb liberal bias has faded somewhat, has ever admitted, in part because it didn't bother to pay attention!

Those people would be right.

Holson also committed some standard Times labeling slant: “Ann Coulter has made a lucrative career out of being the outspoken, sometimes outrageous Cassandra of the far right...” Holson placed World Net Daily editor Joseph Farah, a recent Coulter critic, on “the extreme right.” The paper has rarely if ever placed an American political figure on “the extreme left.”

You can follow Times Watch on Twitter.


TOPICS: Culture/Society; Front Page News; News/Current Events; Politics/Elections
KEYWORDS: anncoulter; coulter
Should we worry? Ann Coulter does want to bring homos into the GOP, she does criticize people for calling Obama a Muslim, and she attacks people who question Obama's eligibility to be President.
1 posted on 10/12/2010 12:43:14 PM PDT by Conservative Coulter Fan
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To: Conservative Coulter Fan

She has never been a straight ideolog. She is still a solid Conservative. Alot of heavy Conservatives have differing views on different topics. Rush doesn’t care about gay marriage, Buckley wanted pot legalized, Peggy Noonan doesn’t even like Conservatives.

The left can never get that we are the open thinkers on all sorts of issues. The left is the doctrinaire lockstep drones.

What has us firing on all 8 cylinders now is the First Principles that the Tea Party are embracing. These are core values we all believe in.


2 posted on 10/12/2010 12:54:05 PM PDT by Lazlo in PA ("Forces of Evil" member in good standing)
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To: Conservative Coulter Fan

I say she is a witch and we must put her on trial.


3 posted on 10/12/2010 1:04:51 PM PDT by Raycpa
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To: Raycpa

I say we skip the trial and go straight to the punishment phase. I’ve got that handled so you can all go back to work.


4 posted on 10/12/2010 1:09:03 PM PDT by Lurker (The avalanche has begun. The pebbles no longer have a vote.)
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To: Conservative Coulter Fan

“she does criticize people for calling Obama a Muslim”

Because she says he only worships himself.

Don’t take her quotes out of context.


5 posted on 10/12/2010 1:09:28 PM PDT by Pessimist
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To: Conservative Coulter Fan

Don’t worry. I get in fights with conservates here at FR all the time. Just bring up Jesus, the Fed, Jews, legalization of drugs or prostitution, whether Bush was a good President, cuts to Social Security, O’Donnell, Rove, any Republican hopeful for the Presidency that has any traction . . . there will be some group that splits off to argue among themselves. And both sides of the argument will think the other are not true conservates, or are bigots, or blinkered imbeciles. It’s all good, and when Miss Coulter punches she leaves a mark. I think she’s the Dorothy Parker of our era . . . and we’ve had an 80 year gap with no contenders. I’m quite happy to let her have her own opinions without thinking less of her.


6 posted on 10/12/2010 1:10:39 PM PDT by November 2010
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To: Raycpa

Trial by fire or toss her in the lake to see if she floats? LOL


7 posted on 10/12/2010 1:11:36 PM PDT by rockrr (Everything is different now)
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To: Lazlo in PA

You shouldn’t add Noonan to that list. She is NOT on our team.


8 posted on 10/12/2010 1:48:56 PM PDT by GeronL (http://libertyfic.proboards.com <--- My Fiction/ Science Fiction Board)
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To: GeronL

“Peggy Noonan doesn’t even like Conservatives.”

I thought that I would ad some levity to the thread. Of course she is a Obummer lib. It was between her and Brooks at the NY Times.


9 posted on 10/12/2010 2:00:09 PM PDT by Lazlo in PA ("Forces of Evil" member in good standing)
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To: Conservative Coulter Fan

Personally, I thought that she had a *huge* angle to sell books a while back, that of exposing the historical perfidy of the left.

I was hoping that she would get with some seriously conservative historians, and do that on the grand scale, gutting the left throughout US history, and *then* with her rewriting it into a popular and sharp read.

She could create a conservative “reference set” of books that would have exposed the left around the world. Identifying their tricks, schemes and plots so that they can be thwarted.

Another book could be a Who’s Who of leftists, mini biographies listing all the foul garbage they have done, who their connections are, who funds them, etc. Stripping them of any ability to pretend to be honest or objective.


10 posted on 10/12/2010 2:00:40 PM PDT by yefragetuwrabrumuy
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To: Conservative Coulter Fan

What happened to all of the previous “obligatory” pics that were supposedly required every time a story about Ann was posted?

Not saying I’m for or against them, just curious.


11 posted on 10/12/2010 2:21:46 PM PDT by secondamendmentkid
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To: Lurker
I say we skip the trial and go straight to the punishment phase. I’ve got that handled so you can all go back to work.

LOL, I'll bet you do.

12 posted on 10/12/2010 4:30:53 PM PDT by Talisker (When you find a turtle on top of a fence post, you can be damn sure it didn't get there on its own.)
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To: secondamendmentkid
What happened to all of the previous “obligatory” pics that were supposedly required every time a story about Ann was posted? Not saying I’m for or against them, just curious.


13 posted on 10/12/2010 4:34:12 PM PDT by Talisker (When you find a turtle on top of a fence post, you can be damn sure it didn't get there on its own.)
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To: AdmSmith; Arthur Wildfire! March; Berosus; bigheadfred; Convert from ECUSA; dervish; ...
Thanks Conservative Coulter Fan.
Reporter Laura Holson, while not actively hostile toward Coulter personally (at least not the way the Times' tag-team of Anne Barnard and Alan Feuer treated anti-Ground Zero mosque blogger Geller), did inaccurately portray Coulter as acting out of opportunism.
Laura Holson
Google
Anne Barnard
Google
Alan Feuer
Google

14 posted on 10/12/2010 5:50:09 PM PDT by SunkenCiv (The 2nd Amendment follows right behind the 1st because some people are hard of hearing.)
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To: Conservative Coulter Fan
Ann Coulter does want to bring homos into the GOP,

I think most conservatives don't have a problem with sinners or people who have a weakness. We have a problem with people who call sin virtue and weakness as something worth having. I don't think Ann has come close to crossing that line.

she does criticize people for calling Obama a Muslim,

0 isn't a Muslim. He likes booze and abortion. He's a secular socialist.

15 posted on 10/12/2010 8:52:06 PM PDT by Tribune7 (The Democrat Party is not a political organization but a religious cult.)
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To: Conservative Coulter Fan

I criticize people for calling Obama a Muslim. His religion id leftism, through and through. If he was a Muslim, he’d be way more conservative. A lot of people on Free Republic have been tricked into believing he is a Muslim. Sure he favors Muslims over Christians. That’s what leftists do.


16 posted on 10/12/2010 11:43:48 PM PDT by nickcarraway
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To: yefragetuwrabrumuy; Anima Mundi; ebiskit; TenthAmendmentChampion; Obadiah; Mind-numbed Robot; ...
Another book could be a Who’s Who of leftists, mini biographies listing all the foul garbage they have done, who their connections are, who funds them, etc. Stripping them of any ability to pretend to be honest or objective.
If you think about it at all, you realize that the only way to attempt to be objective is to declare up front all the reasons why you might not be objective.

And that implies that anyone who claims to be objective - i.e., journalists as we have known them all our lives - is not even trying to be objective.

Are there any reasons why journalists might not be objective? Of course - every business has its own interests. Some of the well-known interests of journalism are:

  1. the need for public credulity, including the need for public credulity of journalism's claims of objectivity,

  2. the need to interest the public. The rules which journalists claim to be objective are actually rules to promote their own business by interesting the public.
    • If it bleeds, it leads
    • "'Man Bites Dog' not 'Dog Bites Man."
    • "There's nothing more worthless than yesterday's newspaper" (i.e., "meet your deadline, tell the story first").
If journalists declared those interests before reporting their stories, they would be more objective. But, superficially, they might seem less so. And journalism - after all, the root "jour" is French for "day" - is about "what's happening now" rather than about perspective and the big picture.
The Associated Press and the rest of the wire services are useful to exploit scarce communication bandwidth. The wire services homogenize journalism, suppressing the individuality which was originally the hallmark of American newspapers. That homogenization does not make newspapers less tendentious - it magnifies the inherent tendency of the journalist to self-hype. Such individuality as is expressed in the editorial/op ed pages merely serves to "position" the rest of the newspaper (chiefly wire service material) as being objective.

The Internet is an expression of the technological fact that bandwidth now is very plentiful. The internet exposes the homogenization of journalism via wire services as the Nineteenth Century anachronism that it is.

The "objective journalism" emperor has no clothes, and no one in journalism can say so. Although I as an individual FReeper cannot drive that fact into the public discourse, via the internet I can publish it in a form which is accessible worldwide. It is up to talk radio and other opinion leaders to pick up the ball and run with it.

Once dispose of the baseless assumption that journalism is objective, and the idea of having journalists moderate televised political debates becomes risible. Dispense with that assumption, and the question becomes whether, and to what extent, politicians align themselves with the tendencies of journalism. And the answer becomes plain as the nose on your face.

Journalists assign positive labels to those who do align themselves with the interests of journalism, and negative labels to those who do not. I have my own Newspeak-English dictionary:

objective :
reliably promoting the interests of Big Journalism. (usage: always applied to journalists in good standing; never applied to anyone but a journalist)
liberal :
see "objective," except that the usage is reversed: (usage: never applied to any working journalist)
progressive :
see "liberal" (usage: same as for "liberal").
moderate:
see "liberal." (usage: same as for "liberal").
centrist :
see "liberal" (usage: same as for "liberal").
conservative :
rejecting the idea that journalism is a higher calling than providing food, shelter, clothing, fuel, and security; adhering to the dictum of Theodore Roosevelt that: "It is not the critic who counts . . . the credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena (usage: applies to people who - unlike those labeled liberal/progressive/moderate/centrist, cannot become "objective" by getting a job as a journalist, and probably cannot even get a job as a journalist.)(antonym:"objective")
right-wing :
see, "conservative."

The Right to Know


17 posted on 10/13/2010 7:20:06 AM PDT by conservatism_IS_compassion (DRAFT PALIN)
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To: conservatism_IS_compassion

BTTT


18 posted on 10/13/2010 7:33:33 AM PDT by E.G.C.
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To: conservatism_IS_compassion
The "objective journalism" emperor has no clothes, and no one in journalism can say so. Although I as an individual FReeper cannot drive that fact into the public discourse, via the internet I can publish it in a form which is accessible worldwide. It is up to talk radio and other opinion leaders to pick up the ball and run with it.

Once dispose of the baseless assumption that journalism is objective, and the idea of having journalists moderate televised political debates becomes risible. Dispense with that assumption, and the question becomes whether, and to what extent, politicians align themselves with the tendencies of journalism. And the answer becomes plain as the nose on your face.

Journalists assign positive labels to those who do align themselves with the interests of journalism, and negative labels to those who do not. I have my own Newspeak-English dictionary:

Thanks for the dictionary, the post, the link(s), the enlightenment, the education.

OUTSTANDING!

19 posted on 10/15/2010 6:07:58 AM PDT by PGalt
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To: yefragetuwrabrumuy; SunkenCiv; All

Another book could be a Who’s Who of leftists, mini biographies listing all the foul garbage they have done, who their connections are, who funds them, etc. Stripping them of any ability to pretend to be honest or objective.

Laura Holson
Google

Anne Barnard
Google

Alan Feuer
Google

BUMP! BUMP!


20 posted on 10/15/2010 6:13:51 AM PDT by PGalt
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