In 2000, the Weekly World News reported its phony space alien’s endorsement for George W. Bush.
In Ed Anger’s America, Vanna White is the perfect role model for Sarah Lee, Mr. Anger’s overweight daughter. Latino immigrants speak “chili-pepperese” and the obese of America simply need to stop eating as much.
“I’m pig-biting mad!” Mr. Anger screams in his column, “My America by Ed Anger,” which has been running in the tabloid Weekly World News for almost three decades. In that time, he has routinely criticized Communists, immigrants, women, overweight children, liberals and pretty much anyone who is not a conservative white American male.
After years of talk radio and cable-news pundits, Ed Anger’s America may feel very familiar, but Ed Anger himself does not. Perhaps that is because he isn’t real.
“I always thought of him as a little buffoonish, myself,” said Rafe Klinger, who created the Ed Anger persona in 1979, during his stint at The News. “The funny thing is, you have people like Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter and Hannity, and to me, they’re not too far from Ed.”
Unlike his more successful real-life counterparts, however, Ed will no longer be able to complain in print. American Media Inc., which also publishes The National Enquirer, The Star and The Globe, announced that it was closing The News last week.
The Weekly World News had long specialized in the sensational and weird — Elvis sightings, UFO abductions, the continuing adventures of Bat Boy — and in attention-grabbing headlines like “Garden of Eden Found: Original Apple Recovered!” and “Grossed-out Surgeon Throws Up Inside Patient.” But its circulation began to lag as competitors turned to full-color (The News remained defiantly black and white) and to celebrity news.
In a March earnings statement, American Media said that single-copy sales of The News had dropped to 83,000 in 2006, down from 153,000 in 2004. Recently, the parent company has been slashing its staff numbers and cutting publications, while struggling with heavy debt.
Bloggers lamented the paper’s demise. “My lifelong dream of writing for them, shattered,” one woman wrote. “Who’s going to report on spontaneous combustion now?”
And while Bat Boy was The News’s most famous creation — an off-Broadway play “Bat Boy: The Musical” appeared in 1997 — Ed Anger epitomized the paper’s say-anything tabloid spirit.
After revelations of child sexual abuse by priests shook the Catholic Church, he suggested that child molesters should be “butchered like hogs.” He also ranted on the use of politically correct language: “When did rain become a ‘precipitation event?’ ” he once complained.
Mr. Klinger said he based the character — a white, middle-aged veteran of the Korean War who displays a portrait of John Wayne in his den — on the anti-Communist rants of a fundamentalist preacher about whom he had once written a straight news story.
“I thought about doing a column with somebody who was kind of like that, who had these ideas that were almost satirical,” said Mr. Klinger, who now writes for The Globe. “But his bible was the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Even though he was constantly criticizing people, he still believed in freedom of speech.”
Elizabeth Bird, the author of “For Enquiring Minds: A Cultural Study of Supermarket Tabloids,” said that Ed Anger reflected a certain kind of stereotypical xenophobia.
“There was this over-the-top anger, the sort of sense of the beleaguered white male who saw everything going to hell in a handbasket around them — uppity women, foreigners and all that sort of thing,” Ms. Bird said. “That is to some extent like Rush Limbaugh; it’s the same sort of genre.”
Ed Anger stirred up trouble for Mr. Klinger in 1989, when he sued The News for continuing the column after he left the tabloid in 1987. Mr. Klinger claimed that Anger’s persona — and the columns themselves — belonged to him. A federal jury ruled against him in 1994.
After Mr. Klinger left, a number of writers picked up Anger’s pen, including the late Eddie Clontz, who edited The News until 2001 and who was widely revered as the “King of the Supermarket Tabloids.” During Mr. Clontz’s tenure, Anger proposed to pave the rainforests and suggested that Mr. Limbaugh should run for president. (The radio host responded gratefully, saying that “we have the trailer-park crowd all wrapped up.”)
Justin Mitchell, a freelance writer who wrote the “My America” column from 2001 to 2003, said he had difficulty inhabiting the character. “I had to sort of assume an Archie Bunker role in my head to do it, and also rely on some sort of tattered satirical instincts I had,” he said. “There were times I just didn’t have it in me. I couldn’t be outrageous enough.”
Anger’s readership evolved over the years, from those sympathizing with his point of view to a group of mostly male college students who, rather than standing on the supermarket checkout line, laughed at Anger’s columns online.
“In the old days, there were audiences that sort of liked it and believed it,” Ms. Bird said. “But it’s gone to talk radio now, and what’s left is the people reading it and knowing that it’s just a parody.”
American Media said that The News would maintain its Web site (www.weeklyworldnews.com). Anger’s column will appear there, but for Mr. Klinger, it just won’t be the same.
“I guess now, he’s retired as a serious journalist,” Mr. Klinger said. “So the laugh’s on me.”
