Ed Anger, the long-time voice at the Weekly World News for the perpetually miffed trailer park set, isn't a real person. After you've picked yourself up off the floor, continue reading.
“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.” ...
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.