Maslin missed the astounding error about her own paper in Slander's last-page peroration, where Coulter indicts the snobbish Times for waiting two days to cover the racing accident that killed NASCAR idol Dale Earnhardt. The morning after the accident, in fact, a story on Earnhardt's demise appeared on page one, under the byline of Robert Lipsyte, one of the paper's most distinguished reporters. (With her customary chutzpah, Coulter denied that this was a mistake "but after the Daily Howler Web site and others exposed the Earnhardt error, Crown corrected it in subsequent editions.).
Meanwhile, in the Los Angeles Times "repeatedly identified by Coulter as a mainstay of the liberal media monopoly "her book's friendly reviewer was Andrew H. Malcolm, former deputy communications chief for the Bush-Cheney 2000 campaign. Both Malcolm and the paper's editors failed to mention his campaign job, even as he touted Slander for exposing alleged press bias against Bush.
While the mainstream press sucked up, perhaps the most cogent analysis of the Coulter phenomenon appeared in a Commentary review by the nonconservative magazine's managing editor, Gary Cohen. He didn't even pretend to conceal his scorn. Brushing aside the footnotes that festoon this "piece of agit-prop,"" he observed that it "pretends to intellectual seriousness where there is none."" Cohen dismissed the constant refrain about liberal media bias as jejune exaggeration, and he mocked the author's injured pose: "Coulter is a strange hybrid "part partisan polemicist, part entertainer, all carefully calculated act. And she pulls it off with aplomb, playing the role of the angry excluded conservative while reaping the rewards of being a blonde maned, mini-skirted celebrity."" Cohen deftly dismisses her manufaturing of sham outrage for personal gain and political advantage.
Coulter is only the latest to work this scam, which employs many people and sells hundreds of thousands of books.
