Her editor at HarperCollins had died, and no amount of hectoring could persuade the company to continue with the Coulter project he left behind. Several months later Crown Publishers bought her book. According to her worldview, of course, both Crown and its parent company, Random House, are "liberal,"" and they have indeed published a wide variety of writers from Gore Vidal and Norman Mailer to Jesse Jackson and. . . Katie Couric. (They also happen to be owned by the German media conglomerate Bertelsmann.).
Before HarperCollins dumped Coulter, the censorious management of the National Review had already seized the opportunity to smother her. America's leading conservative magazine dropped her column from its online edition after she made an infamous recommendation for dealing with Islamist terror: "We should invade their countries, kill their leaders, and convert them to Christianity."" Comporting herself after her dismissal with characteristic dignity and intellectual rigor, Coulter responded by taunting National Review editors Rich Lowry and Jonah Goldberg as "girly boys."" (It's a tough playground at Ronald Reagan Junior High.) In Slander, Coulter doesn't mention the National Review episode.
What's wrong with this picture? America's most visible right-wing propagandist is fired without warning by William F. Buckley Jr.'s venerable magazine. Her book is killed abruptly by Rupert Murdoch's publishing house but later picked up by a liberal, European-owned Manhattan firm. She embarks on a triumphant promotional tour through the studios and newsrooms of the same "liberal media- establishment excoriated in that book. She continues to lament the squelching of innocent conservatives by scheming liberals.
The mainstream newspapers that sit atop Coulter's fictional leftist "propaganda machine- all treated Slander quite gently. The New York Times gave it to cultural critic Janet Maslin, who mildly criticized its "insult slinging- and "sarcastic overkill- but was too awed by its thirty-six pages of footnotes to determine whether any of them were accurate.
