Infinitive Splitter

I wrote yesterday that Joey Porter, who made news last fall for calling Kellen Winslow a “fag” during an on-camera interview, was “not really a guy I’d want to get too close to,” even though I still like to watch him play football. I can overlook athletes’ politics and their ignorance about modern decency (John Rocker and, more recently, Tim Hardaway are two beyond-the-pale exceptions) because most of them are semi-educated man-children whose sole purpose in life has been to excel at a physical activity not connected to their ideas about human interaction in general society.

When the Porter story broke, as I recalled yesterday, I saw it mostly as an example of shoddy journalism, since early reports led with the fact that Porter had called Winslow “a derogatory name,” but they didn’t say what the name was. (If the insult is newsworthy, the news report should tell readers what the insult is.)

Mere hours after I published yesterday’s item, right-wing heroine Ann Coulter took the stage for her much-anticipated address at the Conservative Political Action Conference, which wraps up today.

During her speech, she said: “I was going to have a few comments on the other Democratic presidential candidate, John Edwards, but it turns out you have to go into rehab if you use the word ‘faggot,’ so I’m — so, kind of at an impasse, can’t really talk about Edwards.” As the video at Think Progress shows, the audience reacted with a Jerry Springer-style “OOOOH,” and then strong applause.

Later in the day, Coulter appeared to endorse presidential candidate Mitt Romney, who had preceded her on stage and spoke of her thus: “I am happy to learn also that after you hear from me, you will hear from Ann Coulter. That is a good thing. Oh yeah!”

So how did the wildly popular, shockingly offensive remark by the unbelievably beloved right-wing kingmaker at the most important conservative gathering of the year go over with Washington’s top political reporters (many of whom were there to cover the event)? Eh, they must have missed it.

In its page A11 report, the New York Times’ only mention of Coulter comes in paragraph 11:

The conference drew thousands of attendees, many of whom waited in a long line out the door for a late-afternoon appearance by Ann Coulter, the conservative author and commentator. Still, the tone of the conference was less excitement about the 2008 campaign than concern about the ideological credentials of the three leading contenders for the Republican nomination.

The Washington Post’s A4 story doesn’t mention Coulter at all. Dana Milbank’s column on page A2 has this paragraph, which relates more to the convention’s general tone than to the implications of one of the right’s most popular figures using the word “faggot” to describe a candidate for president:

In the session preceding Romney, Rep. Sam Johnson (R-Tex.) said of Cindy Sheehan, whose son died in Iraq: “She’s an idiot.” In the session after Romney, Ann Coulter used an anti-gay slur to describe John Edwards (the line drew applause) and asked: “Did Al Gore actually swallow Michael Moore?” When a questioner asked Coulter why she praises marriage but broke off so many engagements, she responded by calling the questioner ugly.

So much for the big two. At least the LA Times got it:

The day’s most controversial speaker proved to be conservative pundit Ann Coulter, who at the end of her speech — which followed Romney’s — used a slur to refer to Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards.

Coulter said she had intended to comment on the former senator from North Carolina, “but it turns out you have to go into rehab if you use the word ‘faggot,’ so I … can’t really talk about Edwards.”

When Joey Porter calls someone a “fag,” it’s newsworthy because Joey Porter shoots from the hip and sometimes his shots go wild. But he’s a professional athlete, and his pronouncements — while damaging in light of the number of people for whom sports figures are role models — aren’t terribly relevant in the larger world. But Ann Coulter is very much a face of the American conservative movement. She is, with Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and a few others, one of the movement’s popularly appointed voices for tellin’ it like it is. The presidential candidates who sought CPAC approval this weekend know exactly what Ann Coulter means to the most powerful branch of the Republican party (which, you may have heard, still controls the White House and the federal judiciary, and maintains considerable strength in the United States Senate).

Ann Coulter is their spokesperson, and it’s time for the press to understand and reflect the unfortunate weight of her words.