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John Fund introduces today’s topic – the media’s Palin obsession and where it has led.
Call it the stalking of Sarah Palin. The former governor of Alaska has been an object of fascination and derision for many reporters ever since she burst onto the national stage in 2008. But the level of continued interest is nonetheless stunning.
Three years ago the left-wing magazine Mother Jones requested Ms. Palin’s gubernatorial emails during the 2008 election. After lengthy delays they were released last Friday in Juneau. The fact that you heard almost nothing about them is because there is almost nothing salacious or scandalous in them. As Britain’s Daily Telegraph noted, “the trove of more than 13,000 emails detailing almost every aspect of Sarah Palin’s governorship of Alaska . . . paints a picture of her as an idealistic, conscientious, humorous and humane woman slightly bemused by the world of politics.”
But the buildup to their release was treated like the prelude to the release of the Pentagon Papers. David Corn of Mother Jones salivated at the prospect of what might be in the 24,199 pages being released. “I have a reporter in Juneau who will grab our set of documents and scan the docs for us in the DC bureau,” he wrote. “I and the eight reporters in my bureau will then pore over these pages. Mother Jones, msnbc.com, and ProPublica will be putting up a searchable online database — very quickly — which will allow everybody (other reporters, readers, and GOP opposition researchers) to join in.”
Other media outlets joined in. …
Charles Krauthammer has a term for this.
… You don’t send it out to strangers to look for gotcha stuff…. And that’s exactly what the mainstream media are doing, and I think it is utterly egregious. …
… Palin Derangement Syndrome. That’s what it is.
Steve Hayward in The Corner.
Increasingly I think Sarah Palin is a real political genius. How else to appreciate how the media have made utter fools of themselves — again — gorging on her e-mail trove like it was the Nixon Watergate tapes or the Starr Whitewater/Lewinski report. The only thing that would have been better is if she’d somehow contrived to delay the release of the e-mail trove until January, when the media would have had to endure the long night and cold temperatures of an Alaska winter.
Toby Harnden of the Daily Telegraph gets the matter right in his column Saturday.
John Fund, Steve Hayward, and later Andrew Malcolm all point to a Telegraph,UK article by Toby Harden. Here it is.
13,000 emails detailing almost every aspect of Sarah Palin’s governorship of Alaska, released late on Friday, paints a picture of her as an idealistic, conscientious, humorous and humane woman slightly bemused by the world of politics.
One can only assume that the Left-leaning editors who dispatched teams of reporters to remote Juneau, the Alaskan capital, to pore over the emails in the hope of digging up a scandal are now viewing the result as a rather poor return on their considerable investment.
If anything, Mrs Palin seems likely to emerge from the scrutiny of the 24,000 pages, contained in six boxes and weighing 275 pounds, with her reputation considerably enhanced. …
…To an extent, the emails remind Americans of the person they saw take the state at the Republican National Convention in Minnesota nearly three years ago – refreshing, plain-speaking, open and uncomplicated. …
Peter Kirsanow lists the stories that are less important than the Palin emails.
? China is about to launch its first aircraft carrier.
? A RAND nuclear expert calculates that within two months, Iran will have enough weapons-grade uranium to manufacture a nuclear weapon.
? An analysis of Bureau of Labor Statistics data shows that if the number of people looking for work today were the same as the number when President Obama took office, the reported unemployment rate for May would be 11 percent rather than 9.1 percent.
? Hearings are beginning in the House on allegations that the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms knowingly allowed criminal suspects to purchase weapons and smuggle them into Mexico for Mexican drug cartels.
? The president is creating yet another commission — this time to cut government waste.
Matt Welch, for CNN, discusses how the MSM disregard their professional duties to follow their liberal bias.
…Three weeks ago, the journalism navel-gazing community was abuzz over an academic study of more than 700 news articles and 20 network news segments from 2009 that addressed a single controversial claim of the health care reform debate.
Was it President Obama’s oft-repeated whopper that he was nobly pushing the reform rock up the hill despite the concentrated efforts of health care“special interests?” Was it his oft-repeated promise that “If you like your health care plan, you will be able to keep your health care plan,” something that is getting even less true by the minute? Was it the way Obama and the Democrats brazenly gamed and misrepresented the Congressional Budget Office’s price-tag scoring of the bill?
No. The cause for Obamacare-coverage reconsideration was not the truth-stretching claims made by a president seeking to radically reshape an important aspect of American life, but rather the Facebook commentary of … Sarah Palin. “In more than 60 percent of the cases,” the authors found, “it’s obvious that newspapers abstained from calling [Palin's] death panels claim false.” Horrors.
There is no shortage of politicians deserving to have their e-mails combed through, no dearth of urgent stories that could benefit from the kind of journalistic enthusiasm we saw Friday afternoon. …
We have a few of the opinions NY Times readers posted.
Journ-O-Lism hard at work.
Could you be any more contemptible, more bereft of integrity, more loathsomely propagandist? More intellectually dishonest? More hypocritical?
Absolute sellout hackery.So jobs at McDonalds and Sarah Palin Investigations are the President’s plan to rescue us from unemployment?
I’m not a fan of Palin’s and I’m not a hater of Obama’s, but this is just plain pathetic. If you’re going to enlist your supposedly more-detail-oriented-and-investigatively-gifted-than-thou readers to do your work for you, please do it for any number of newsworthy stories that you aren’t currently giving enough attention to. I’m disgusted that anyone even thought this was a good idea.
The New York Times are just using the conditions of our economy to their benefit. This is a great idea! They know that because of Obama, there are so many people out of work with nothing to do, they can have thousands upon thousands of people doing their work for free. Great example of another Obama success story! Unemployment rate helps the NYT save money!
Wow – anyone you brings on this much hate from the NYtimes must be of great value!
I believe I just fell in love with Sarah!
Thanks!
You go girl!
NY Post editors weigh in.
Could Big Media look any dumber?
The all-points-bulletin attention that national media organizations gave to the release last week of official e-mails from Sarah Palin’s tenure as Alaska’s governor sure backfired. Not only was Palin not discredited by the emails, but they exposed to the public a competent leader and a rather decent human being. Imagine the disappointment of The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times and other outlets.
To help sift through 24,000 pages of e-mails, coughed up via freedom-of-information requests, the publications recruited readers to wade through the pages online, in search of embarrassing tidbits. This, in addition to the teams of reporters they sent. It all yielded precious little.
A governor who tried to keep spending under control and taxes low? Simply shocking. …
Here’s what Jon Stewart thinks of the media’s obsession.
We close with a post from Anthony Malcolm in which he shows us a Palin communiqué that surfaced during the search. It is her announcement to family, friends and interested parties of the forthcoming arrival of their son Trig. This was where they told of his Down’s Syndrome. It is written as if it was God’s explanation of why this child was joining this family. The letter is a lovely example of abiding faith.