Suggesting the murder of the first Vietnam War veteran elected to Congress and slamming 9/11 victims apparently hasn't scared away any of the 100-plus editors who run her syndicated column, reports Editor & Publisher, which quotes a statement from Universal Press Syndicate:"Ann's client newspapers stick with her because she has a loyal fan base of conservative readers who look forward to reading her columns in their local newspapers."
"We've never felt that it is a syndicate's job to censor commentary. It is the nature of commentary that it is to inflame." She said they "leave it to editors" to run or hold certain columns or cartoons, but they are not allowed to edit them.
Editors, she pointed out, have chosen not to run certain Doonesbury or Boondocks cartoons, which come from the liberal side of the spectrum. Asked if any paper had ever decided not to run a conservative column or cartoon, she said, "If it's happened, we don't know about it."
Ironically enough, E&P notes, when a left-wing Universal creator slammed the same bunch of 9/11 widows as Ms. Coulter did, the reaction was not so benign.
Ted Rall, also satirized some 9/11 widows in a 2002 drawing -- but, in his case, was hurt financially. Rall, who called Coulter's comments "a lot meaner" than his cartoon, noted that he lost WashingtonPost.com as a client.
And, in a Tuesday column linked on Rall's blog, Phil Reisman of The Journal News in White Plains, N.Y., discussed other fallout from that 2002 cartoon: "Rall was effectively roasted by the conservatives. For example, right-wing bloggers flooded Men's Health magazine, where his cartoon appeared, and he lost that outlet. His work used to appear frequently in the political cartoon section of The New York Times Week In Review, but that was stopped. In the end, Rall figures the backlash cost him $40,000 to $50,000 in business."
Reisman adds that Rall also received death threats by phone and email, but "none of the TV and radio talk-show blatherers on either end of the political spectrum came to his aid." Not quite the case with Ms. Coulter.