Diary of a Mad Editor

Conservative blogger and author of the book 7 Myths of Working Mothers, Susan Venker, has written a follow-up post to her previous entry on liberal media biased in publishing. In this entry, she whines about how mainstream publishers don’t want to publish books by conservatives. To prove her thesis, she cites Michelle Malkin and Ann Coulter’s early years of rejection and her own struggle to get her book published.

Well, all writers get rejected. If there’s a writer out there who’s never been rejected, I don’t know of one. Second, I don’t recall anywhere in the Constitution an amendment stating that writers have a right to be published — only that they have the right to say and write what they want to write. And, while that little annecdote about the unnamed literary agent, refusing to represent "conservatives" may be true for all I know, one agent out of thousands doesn’t exactly make your case that there’s a vast left-wing conspiracy to keep conservative writers from getting their idiot message out there.

Now, I didn’t read your book, Ms. Venker, so I can’t really critique it, but I sincerely doubt that mainstream publishers rejected it because of your politics. They probably just thought it wouldn’t sell very well. Sure, Laura Ingraham and Michelle Malkin are both published by Regnery Publishing, which is a conservative press, but what about Coulter, Limbaugh, Beck, O’Reilly, etc.? Beck and Limbaugh are both published by imprints of Simon and Shuster. O’Reilly and Coulter are both published by imprints of Random House. What about Michael Savage? He’s had books published by conservative and mainstream publishers. The idea that there’s a liberal media bias in book publishing is a myth concocted by right-wing crybabies to explain why most intelligent people think they are idiots. What if I said that conservative publishers were prejudiced against progressive writers? After all, I’ve pointed to examples of conservative writers published by mainstream publishers, but can you name a single progressive writer published by a conservative publisher? Obviously, there’s a biased there, but who fucking cares, Ms. Venker? Anyone can start a publishing company and publish whatever they want. I could decide to only publish books about peanut butter. Does that mean I don’t like jelly? Maybe, maybe not. Maybe it just means that I like peanut butter a whole lot better. So get over it.

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