Media's Voices of Dissent May No Longer Be Welcome

by Manuel Mendoza
The Dallas Morning News
October 4, 2001

Open discussion and pointed opinion are no longer being taken for granted in the wake of Sept. 11.

Columnists have been fired, a magazine has been taken to task for pretty prose in the face of tragedy, and White House spokesman Ari Fleischer has warned that Americans "need to watch what they say, watch what they do."

Fleischer was responding to comments made by Bill Maher, the host of ABC's late-night discussion/comedy show Politically Incorrect. Maher dared to say the United States was "cowardly" for launching cruise missiles from a safe distance, not the hijackers who crashed planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

He later apologized, sort of, "to anyone who took it wrong." He was talking about politicians, he said, not the men and women in uniform.

Nonetheless, FedEx and Sears dropped their ads from the program, and several network affiliates stopped airing it.

Rumors circulated that ABC was going to cancel the show, but the host was back at it this week, debating racial profiling and Americans' lack of historical perspective with his guests.

Still, the dispute between Maher and the White House is only the most publicized tip of an iceberg that could have a chilling effect.

Newspaper columnists in Grants Pass, Ore., and Texas City, Texas, were dismissed after they criticized President Bush's decision not to immediately return to Washington after the terrorist attacks. One accused him of "hiding in a Nebraska hole."

In the hawkish New Republic, literary editor Leon Wieseltier went after The New Yorker.

"Beware fine writing," he wrote of Adam Gopnik's piece on the beauty of New York after the attacks and of Susan Sontag's politically pointed commentary on the causes. "It, too, is a cheap balm."

Some comments have been so absurd as to be laughable.

Jerry Falwell pointed the finger at gays, "abortionists" and feminists.

German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen called the World Trade Center attacks "the greatest work of art ever. People practice madly for 10 years, completely, fanatically, for a concert and then die." A New York concert of his music was promptly canceled.

And TV pundit Ann Coulter _ one of the so-called "Republican blondes" who have been showing up on talk shows since the Clinton era _ lost her contributing-editor position at the National Review because of two online columns, the second of which the magazine refused to post.

"We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity," she wrote in the first. In the second, she advocated extra scrutiny of "suspicious-looking swarthy males."

Yet she is part of the mix that makes Politically Incorrect and its ilk so vital. For every Ann Coulter or extremist from the left, there are two or three panelists every night (including Maher) who want to seriously debate how we arrived at this moment in history and what we should do about it.

Some people would have everyone simply line up behind our leaders and shut up, including some in the media.

"There's no room for that kind of voice right now," one radio talk-show host said after hanging up on a caller who was critical of President Bush's handling of the crisis.

Humor, on the other hand, has both suffered and flourished in the weeks since the attacks. Saturday Night Live and other late-night comedy shows have all but avoided topical jokes, with Jay Leno complaining that he can't make fun of politicians anymore.

Still, the satirical online magazine The Onion received a record 400,000 hits on the first day its latest issue was posted.

The issue, with an expletive-laced logo that mocked media brands such as "Attack on America" and "America's New War," was chock-full of attack-related humor.

Headlines included "Hijackers Surprised to Find Selves in Hell" and "Arab-American Third-Grader Returns From Recess Crying, Saying He Didn't Kill Anyone."

And Politically Incorrect, enjoying higher ratings since the controversy, has forged on, with Maher joking Monday that Americans used to think the people who hated them the most were the French.

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E-mail: mmendoza@dallasnews.com

(c) 2001, The Dallas Morning News.

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