Papers Drop Coulter’s Column
The right move, as far as I’m concerned.
NEW YORK (Reuters) – Three newspapers said this week they will drop Ann Coulter’s column after the conservative author referred to U.S. Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards as a “faggot.”
The Mountain Press in Sevierville, Tennessee, The Oakland Press in Michigan and the Lancaster New Era in Pennsylvania said they would stop running Coulter’s syndicated column because of the comment she made last week.
Republicans and Democrats have lambasted Coulter for using the gay slur in reference to Edwards, a former U.S. senator, during a speech March 2 at the American Conservative Union’s Political Action Conference.
“We will not continue to publish the columns of someone who uses people as a punch line to get a cheap laugh and who so freely uses an offensive term to describe another human being,” Mountain Press Editor Stan Voit wrote.
The New Era’s editorial board said it would halt the column following her “crude characterization of presidential candidate John Edwards as a homosexual.”
It also criticized Coulter’s column on its Web site. “The quality of public discussion falls below that which Lancaster County residents expect in the opinion pages of their daily newspaper.”
The readers of these papers will undoubtedly be better served by someone who, unlike Coulter, is more interested in interesting and provocative political analysis then childish epithets usually reserved for insecure high school bullies.
And no, this isn’t an example of Coulter being “censored.” These are private publications making a decision about the content they wish to carry in their newspapers. If this is indeed the wrong move I’m sure it will impact these papers’ bottom line. But I don’t think it will.
