CONSERVATIVE trashtalker Ann Coulter trashed four New Jersey 9/11 widows in her new book, “Godless:The Church of Liberalism” (Crown Forum); she said they were left-wing publicity hounds reveling in their husbands’ deaths.
Of course, she did. It’s not as if Coulter doesn’t know how to play the media game.
What else was she supposed to do, display her sensitive side? Who wants that? No book publisher, and no TV producer, that’s for sure.
Naturally, as soon as Coulter’s knock on the 9/11 widows made the news, the race to book her was on.
NBC’s “Today” won. And from that national TV venue, Coulter, employing roughly the same marketing techniques as another NBC favorite, Vince McMahon, continued to attack the widows, whom she dubs “The Witches of East Brunswick.” That Coulter is a political right-winger is of no particular significance.
Anyone coming from any direction, these days, knows what it takes to get on TV:
You must throw fastballs aimed either at the head or the crotch. You must demonstrate the kind of shamelessness that would make you instantaneously identifiable for the shock you manufacture.
After all, what political attributes, besides shock production, does TV favor?
In other words, say a network were interested in starting a nightly show that explored issues of crime and punishment, a show that would be hosted by, say, a former prosecutor. Would that network search for a well-spoken person who typically employs logic to deliver measured responses?
Would it look for a host with a sagacious mind and a humble demeanor?
Hell, no. It will look for the next Nancy Grace, the ghoulishly vindictive and ironically named two-network (Court TV, CNN) trash-talker whose backseat sense of justice is from the school of Ready, Fire, Aim!
Here’s the saddest, most frightening part of it all:
If a potential political savior exhibited social sensitivity and if he or she were also a great healer, a decisive and intelligent world and national leader – but if he or she refused to talk soundbite trash, choosing, rather, to deliver campaign messages in an unfailingly dignified manner – we’d never be exposed to that person on television.
TV would have no patience and certainly no time for such a dullard. His or her political career wouldn’t get past the village school board. But that village would be in far better shape than our country.
Given what TV now permits to be broadcast in America, no political leader – no potential President of the United States – could emerge from any direction if he or she were an unyielding proponent of a personality trait as antiquated as modesty.
A candidate who refused to be a trash-talker wouldn’t be a candidate for long in our currrent climate.
That TV doesn’t allow for genuine statesmanship does not mean that genuine statesmen are extinct. But it sure seems that way.
Meanwhile, a lot of folks were outraged by what Coulter wrote and said. Of course they were. And plenty agreed with her, too. Thus, the polarization of American politics – on the lowest conceivable intellectual level – continues.
This week, it’ll be someone else’s turn to talk trash, thus stimulate, for TV’s purposes, what passes for intelligent political debate.
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WPIX-Ch. 11 now features what must be the most pathetic weekday daytime lineup in the history of commercial television:
From 10-11a.m., Ch. 11 airs “Maury,” followed, from 11noon, by “The Jerry Springer Show,” followed by another hour of Maury Povich’s low-life festival, followed, from 1-2 p.m. by another hour of Springer.
That’s four consecutive hours of pure garbage.