Ann Coulter in Time

[Jack]

Anybody read this week's issue of Time?

She's on the cover. I saw it in the school library yesterday.

Apparently, she doesn't make a dime from all her appearances on TV (and that's the only venue through which I know her). The only money she gets comes from her books and speeches.

Quite interesting article...

[OnTheMoor]

Apparently, she doesn't make a dime from all her appearances on TV (and that's the only venue through which I know her). The only money she gets comes from her books and speeches.

She does well enough with her books through her tv appearances. Be glad you only know her from television.

[Jack]

Apparently, she doesn't make a dime from all her appearances on TV (and that's the only venue through which I know her). The only money she gets comes from her books and speeches.

She does well enough with her books through her tv appearances. Be glad you only know her from television.

I started to buy her book about how to talk to a liberal, but I couldn't find one in my price range (I'm cheap). I hear she's a really good writer.

She also looks like my sister Sally, the one with the ugly green shoes.

[Pat Cannady]

Her books read better in the original German...

[Jack]

Her books read better in the original German...

If she wrote in German, I'd definately buy one.

[jim stone]

She strikes me as very bright but over the top.
The sort of conservative conservatives could
do without. But I haven't read time.

[jGilder]

Here's an interesting perspective on Time Magazine and the Ann Coulter cover story. It's from a blog by Amitabh Pal, Managing Editor of The Progressive.

The Death of Time

by Amitabh Pal
The Progressive
April 19, 2005

Time magazine fell to a new low this week. The April 25 cover features none other than Ann Coulter. This may finally mark the death of Time as a serious newsmagazine.

The slow descent of the publication has been apparent in recent years. Hard news is featured less and less on the cover. And rarely will the cover deal with an international issue. In fact, the entire news hole has shrunk, as the magazine devotes increasing space to lifestyle, health and entertainment features. The few decent hard-hitting stories that are featured are most often buried inside. The magazine has consciously decided to stoop to conquer. One of the prevalent notions at publications like Time has been to mug people at the grocery checkout counter, and if Ann Coulter helps a publication in doing that, then so be it. Never mind that it ignores far more newsworthy events in order to do so.

A look at the last month or two of the magazine anecdotally confirms the fluff makeover.

While to be fair to the magazine, there is a cover story or two that deserves to be there (for instance, Jeffrey Sachs on world poverty in the March 14 issue), most of the covers are non-news and non-daring. On February 28, Time ran "The Right (and the Wrong Way) to Treat Pain." On March 21, it was "Hail, Mary" on the occasion of Easter. The next week it was Teri Hatcher as the cover photo, with the line "Has TV Gone too Far?"

A recent study confirms my hunch about Time and its two cousins--Newsweek and U.S. News & World Report. "The last few decades have seen internal remaking at the three traditional publications. They have transformed themselves, altered their content to be lighter and broader in topic and tone, and, coincidentally or not, lost circulation," says the Project for Excellence in Journalism, affiliated with Columbia University, in its 2005 annual survey http://www.stateofthemedia.org/2005/nar ... =1&media=7 .

In other words, the folks at People magazine are well on their way to completing their takeover of their sister publication.

It saddens me to disparage Time this way because I can truly claim to having grown up on it. My father has not only subscribed to it for the past forty-five years, but actually has all the old issues lovingly archived in bound volumes. It is instructive to go back and take a look at issues from the 1960s and 1970s, as I've done a number of times. The magazine did largely focus on genuine news. That's why it was such a big deal when Bruce Springsteen made the cover of Time (and Newsweek) in 1975, since the magazine seldom featured celebrities that prominently back then.

Sure, much of the coverage was distorted through Henry Luce's Cold War prism, but at least there was substance.

The magazine's website has a really fun feature www.time.com/time/coversearch , by which you can search for a cover during any particular week in the magazine's history. The random searches I did for the '60s and the '70s almost always turned up hard news covers ("The Arms Race," "Deadlock in the Middle East"), a far different selection from now. And the international news section often went on for pages and pages, a contrast to current coverage.

James L. Baughman, director of the school of journalism and mass communication at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, compared four issues of Time in 1968 with four from 1998. "The April 5, 1968, issue contained a six-page cover story on Czechoslovakia, as well as entries on Poland, Russia, the Middle East, Egypt, China, Indonesia, Britain, and Panama," wrote Baughman, who excluded stories on Vietnam. "The four issues for May 1998 included a total of eight overseas stories. In other words, a single issue in 1968 carried as many international entries as an entire month of issues 30 years later." (His study. "The Transformation of Time magazine," ran in Media Studies Journal, Fall 1998.)

All this points to a larger recent problem with big media organizations: the tendency to place primacy on the bottom line. "All across America news organizations have been devoured by massive corporations, and allegiance to stockholders, the drive for higher share prices, and push for larger dividend returns trumps everything that the grunts in the newsrooms consider their missions," Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Laurie Garrett stated in a recent memo when she quit Newsday (available at http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp ... 1000819198 ).

In his January 24 media column, Howard Kurtz of The Washington Post focuses on former CBS foreign correspondent Tom Fenton and his recent book, "Bad News." According to Kurtz, Fenton describes how "corporate greed" impelled networks such as CBS to disregard foreign news http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/ar ... Jan23.html . CBS once asked him to nix a story on bin Laden because it contained "too many foreign names," obviously not of interest to an American public.

In that sense, Time magazine's decline is just a symptom of a broader phenomenon at work: the tendency of the American public to navel-gaze, and the propensity of the American conglomerate media to feed that obsession in order to swell profits. That's why Time buries the natural cover on Tom DeLay or a good, if more obscure, story on the possibility of the Maldives islands drowning due to global warming in its inside pages, while a story devoid of any larger significance (Coulter) is put on the cover. I hope the magazine's news judgment is wrong, but I fear that, measured by the only benchmark of interest to the publication, I may be the one in error.

[Jack]

She strikes me as very bright but over the top.
The sort of conservative conservatives could
do without. But I haven't read time.

The story discusses that--how the left hate her, but the religious element of the right also doesn't like her.

She called White House reporter Helen Thomas "that old Arab", and seriously suggested we should invade France. So many conservatives think she does more harm than good.

But she's hot. And of course that's all that matters!

[The Weekenders]

Didn't Time put Al Franken on the cover? Was there an equal outrage from the Progressive whatever?

I think the article is a little late....I haven't taken it seriously for decades. There is just something shallow about much of its reporting, except for the occasional essay, like the old Hugh Sidey thinkpieces,whose value seemed to flow from a search for historical perpective.

I remember at the time I was in high school and college, there was Time, Newsweek and US News and World Report as somewhat equal journalistic equivalents. I know that there was at least one occasion when Time and Newsweek ran the same covers. I always thought of Time and Newsweek as sorta equally fluffy, but US News and WR a bit harder journalism-wise.

Serious types of various ideological bents have referred to other publications for years. For some, its the Wall St. Journal. I know that many read the Economist, though its a pricey news-source.

The chief difference to me between Time and other monthlies is that I feel they are spoon-feeding their version of reality, as does CNN, Fox, and the major network broadcasts. The Web has really sensitized many, I think, to rejecting those visions because we get so much more raw info (true or false, for better or worse). Remember that Time ran with the "warlords of Somalia" and the "elite Republican guard" jingoes, and that bugs me to this day. I mean, who decided that everybody was going to continually pound those phrases or metaphors into everyone, over and over?

I guess the intrinsic value of newsweeklies is the photography (trumped by instant video) and at least somewhat longer reports than papers or teevee. But really, serialized newspaper reports on given issues seem more substantive to me. From what I read here at work (somebody brings Time in) there is not the continuity of serialized reporting, but I admittedly do not read it that carefully.

I don't find Coulter any more outrageous than Janeane Garofalo, though she is likely better educated. Nobody on the Left seems embarrassed by Garofalo and the Air America glib-meisters, so why should the Right be? Or is that old double standard of higher expectations of Repubs and right-leaners pokin' out again?

Just because Coulter has carved out a dinky island of turf surrounded by the vast mediocre middle or flamin' left seems to really bother some people. To me, her value, like Laura Ingraham or Hush Bimbo, is that they cull interesting quotes from what they consider the opposition, just as the left leaners do with quotes from Bush, Rice, Cheney and others.

Big deal.

[jim stone]

I like it when the shrill, hysterical sort of voices
are on the other side, as generally they've been.
I figure they cost the other side votes, finally.

[Walden]

Didn't Time put Al Franken on the cover?

Isn't that the Saturday Night Live self-help affirmation guy, Stuart Smalley?

[The Weekenders]

Yup, Walden. Good enough, smart enough, and goshdarnit, people like 'im.

I wish he stayed with the comedy because he is truly funny. He is apparently gonna run for Paul Wellstone's seat.

[Jack]

Yup, Walden. Good enough, smart enough, and goshdarnit, people like 'im.

I wish he stayed with the comedy because he is truly funny. He is apparently gonna run for Paul Wellstone's seat.

Isn't it Norm Coleman's seat, though?

[IRTradRU?]

Didn't Time put Al Franken on the cover? Was there an equal outrage from the Progressive whatever?

Well of course not. Of course, they haven't put Nancy Pelosi on the cover, either, and her ethical lapses are every bit as a problem as DeLay's. The difference, however, is that DeLay hasn't been found guilty of anything (though it could turn out that way) and yet Pelosi was fined $21,000 for illegal campaign contributions.

I think the article is a little late....I haven't taken it seriously for decades. There is just something shallow about much of its reporting, except for the occasional essay, like the old Hugh Sidey thinkpieces,whose value seemed to flow from a search for historical perpective.

Agreed. It's been more like 'People' magazine, from my view. The few times I've bothered to peruse Time has usually been in a waiting room or other such place when anything will do - usually when staring at the walls has become tedious.

I don't find Coulter any more outrageous than Janeane Garofalo, though she is likely better educated. Nobody on the Left seems embarrassed by Garofalo and the Air America glib-meisters, so why should the Right be? Or is that old double standard of higher expectations of Repubs and right-leaners pokin' out again?

You're putting Garofalo in pretty esteemed company, IMO, by even mentioning her in the same line as Ann Coulter, who has a law degree from the University of Michigan. To her credit, Garofalo attended college in Rhode Island (Providence College) and graduated with a degree in History.

To me, her value, like Laura Ingraham ...

As an aside, I understand that Laura Ingraham underwent surgery today for breast cancer.

[cowtime]

Anybody read this week's issue of Time?

She's on the cover. I saw it in the school library yesterday.

Apparently, she doesn't make a dime from all her appearances on TV (and that's the only venue through which I know her). The only money she gets comes from her books and speeches.

Quite interesting article...

Ann Coulter has made her name recognizable and therefore profitable by being an over the top, raving mad liberal hater. I almost said she was a conservative there, but hate to slam conservatives that badly. She's a loose cannon who says whatever she calculates is most likely to get press. How anyone could give anything she says or writes any credibility is beyond my understanding.