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Today the theme is Sarah Palin and her treatment by the national media. We start with a columnist from North Carolina’s Rhinoceros Times. (You never know what rocks Pickerhead will turn over) The iconoclastic author, Orson Scott Card, says he’s a Dem. Watch as he lays into the press.
… If you had any personal honor, each reporter and editor would be insisting on telling the truth — even if it hurts the election chances of your favorite candidate.
Because that’s what honorable people do. Honest people tell the truth even when they don’t like the probable consequences. That’s what honesty means. That’s how trust is earned.
Barack Obama is just another politician, and not a very wise one. He has revealed his ignorance and naïveté time after time — and you have swept it under the rug, treated it as nothing.
Meanwhile, you have participated in the borking of Sarah Palin, reporting savage attacks on her for the pregnancy of her unmarried daughter — while you ignored the story of John Edwards’ own adultery for many months.
So I ask you now: Do you have any standards at all? Do you even know what honesty means?
Is getting people to vote for Barack Obama so important that you will throw away everything that journalism is supposed to stand for?
You might want to remember the way the National Organization of Women (NOW) threw away their integrity by supporting Bill Clinton despite his well-known pattern of sexual exploitation of powerless women. Who listens to NOW anymore? We know they stand for nothing; they have no principles.
That’s where you are right now. …
… You’re just the public relations machine of the Democratic Party, and it’s time you were all fired and real journalists brought in, so that we can actually have a daily newspaper in our city.
Daniel Henninger’s column focuses on the treatment of Sarah Palin.
… Sarah Palin didn’t design a system of presidential primaries whose length and cost ensures that only the most obsessional personalities will run the gauntlet, while a long list of effective governors don’t run.
These rules have wasted the electorate’s time the past three presidential elections, by filling the debates with such zero-support candidates as Dennis Kucinich, Mike Gravel, Al Sharpton, Duncan Hunter, Chris Dodd, Joe Biden (8,000 total votes), Wesley Clark and Alan Keyes.
Out of this process has fallen a Democratic nominee who entered the U.S. Senate in 2005 fresh off a stint in the Illinois state legislature, with next to no record of political accomplishment. He may be elected mainly because, in Colin Powell’s word, he is thought to be “transformational.” One may hope so.
By not bothering to look very deeply at the details beneath either candidate’s governing proposals, the media have created a lot of downtime to take free kicks at Gov. Palin. My former colleague, Tunku Varadarajan, has compiled a glossary of Palin invective, and I’ve added a few: “Republican blow-up doll,” “idiot,” “Christian Stepford wife,” “Jesus freak,” “Caribou Barbie,” “a dope,” “a fatal cancer to the Republican Party,” “liar,” “a national disgrace” and “her pretense that she is a woman.”
If American politics is at low ebb, it is because so many of its observers enjoy working in its fetid backwash. …
Kirsten Powers in NY Post compares to the media’s Biden coverage.
Barack Obama‘s choice of Joe Biden as his running mate prompted a small wave of warnings about Biden’s propensity for gaffes. But no one imagined even in a worse-case scenario such a spectacular bomb as telling donors Sunday to “gird your loins” because a young president Obama will be tested by an international crisis just like young President John Kennedy was.
Scary? You betcha! But somehow, not front-page news.
Again the media showed their incredible bias by giving scattered coverage of Biden’s statements.
There were a few exceptions. On MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” co-host Mika Brzezinski flipped incredulously through the papers, expressing shock at the lack of coverage of Biden’s remarks. Guest Dan Rather admitted that if Palin had said it, the media would be going nuts.
So what gives? …
Now some of our favorites from The Corner get in the act. Byron York comments on Palin’s accessibility.
Mark Steyn posts on her latest Colorado visit.
Byron, yesterday in Grand Junction 22,000 people turned up to see Sarah Palin, which if memory serves is rather larger than the numbers Jack Kemp was drawing back in ’96. If my experience in New Hampshire is anything to go by, the size of the crowd is inversely proportional to the number of journalists who show up. At Weirs Beach, in a pitiful attempt to avoid detection as another lattè-sipping metrocon about to jump to Obama, I eschewed the reserved media pen and lined up for hours with my fellow Granite Staters for the privilege of getting into steerage. We were packed in. The media pen was empty, save for a handful of reporters, one of whom was a New Hampshire-born correspondent for The Providence Journal and two others of whom were from the excellent fellows at the ”Meet The New Press” radio show at WEMJ. (They came to the Long/Goldberg/Steyn NR pre-primary palooza in Manchester, too.) But otherwise Governor Palin could have hunted caribou on the vast empty yawning tundra of the press pen. …
Byron York tells the story of a CNN reporter who deliberately, maliciously, egregiously misquoted him to Palin.
Lisa Schiffren on the big scoop on cost of Sarah’s wardrobe.
So now we learn that the RNC shelled out $150,000 for clothing, hair, and make-up for Sarah Palin since her surprise nomination. Scandal! Gotcha! Such hypocrisy! If she wants the Joe Six-pack vote, the “logic” goes, why isn’t she wearing clothes from Target? Huh? While everyone seems to get that Palin had to have an emergency make-over for prime time, this particular number offends — as does the fact that she didn’t pay for it herself.
Was a new wardrobe necessary? Clearly. Last winter, when she posed for Vogue, Governor Palin wore a big, army green parka, (partly to hide her pregnancy), which looked great — but perhaps not entirely vice presidential. No one wears that sort of thing to, say, National Security Council meetings in D.C. In pre-September pictures, she wears inexpensive, perfectly appropriate but not ready for prime-time black suits, or the kind of outdoor clothing that Alaskans, and others who spend a lot of time in harsh elements, require. Her biggest sartorial luxury seems to have been fancy running shoes, as she told the Wall Street Journal weekend section, just before being nominated.
But then, a few days before Labor Day, lightening hit. …
Mona Charen on the clothes too.
Now a story from CBS News complaining about Biden being hidden from news conferences. Do you think the rest of the media will pick this up?
… Last month in Akron, Biden chided McCain and Palin for not holding such availabilities with the press.
“I got asked a question by the press this morning, er, yesterday,” Biden told the crowd last month. “I’ve done a lot of press, I’ve done, I don’t know, I was told I did 68, 70 press conferences, and the person says, ‘What do you think about Sarah Palin?’ I said, ‘When she does three, I’ll let you know, I don’t know, I don’t have any idea, I don’t know, I don’t know.’ You know, I mean, look, and it’s not, look guys, it’s not just Sarah Palin, when’s the last time John, when’s the last time John’s had a press conference? I’m serious.”
Biden was factually incorrect – he had conducted at the time over 80 interviews, not press conferences, ranging from local newspapers to network morning shows, with an appearance on NBC’s “Meet the Press” and a dozen interviews with major networks and newspapers.
And to belatedly answer Biden’s question, it has been 55 days since he held a press conference. He has held two since being named Obama’s running mate.
Biden has also not taken questions from voters in a town hall style setting since Sept. 10 in Nashua, New Hampshire, when he told a supporter that Hillary Clinton might have been a better pick for vice president.
Since then, Biden has only held “community gatherings” and “rallies” where he makes a speech and chats briefly with supporters on the ropeline under the blare of music, no questions asked. …
Power Line posts on Palin’s very effective remarks in Reno addressing Biden’s “testing” scenario. A link is here so you can see it yourself.
Power Line also posts on the possibilities of illegal donations at the two campaigns.
… Many readers point out that the Obama campaign would exercise some control over the security level required to verify small dollar transactions and that no collusion with the card issuer or bank is therefore required. Mark Steyn elaborates here. Mark explains the question of security settings and then adds:
As the Powerline reader has noted, if “John Galt” of “Ayn Rand Lane” attempts a contribution at the McCain campaign, it gets rejected. Which is just as well. If the Republican candidate’s website were intentionally set up to facilitate fraudulent donations, it would be on the front page of The New York Times. But, as it’s King Barack the Spreader, we can rest assured the crack investigative units will be too preoccupied with Governor Palin’s shoes over the next two weeks.
It is a point that needs making and that could be made every day. …
Entertainment Weekly interviews SNL’s Lorne Michaels on the Palin appearance last Saturday night.
EW: How incredibly fortunate was it that the election’s breakout star also happens to look exactly like Tina?
LM: There was all that, and it’s the first election with a star in a long time. The great part about the Palin thing was — and I’ve said it all too often — was that the audience cast Tina. You’d read or people would come up to you and say, what a gift. You want to point out that Tina’s no longer in the cast, that she has her own show. But I think if we had used Kristin [Wiig], who I think would’ve done a brilliant Sarah Palin, the audience would’ve been disappointed. No question about it. And Tina’s fantastic.What do you think Palin gained from her appearance?
I think Palin will continue to be underestimated for a while. I watched the way she connected with people, and she’s powerful. Her politics aren’t my politics. But you can see that she’s a very powerful, very disciplined, incredibly gracious woman. This was her first time out and she’s had a huge impact. People connect to her.