Posted on 06/15/2011 10:47:35 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
The Sarah Palin email saga produced exactly one bombshell: The mainstream media actually managed to elicit sympathy for Sarah Palin from the showbiz elite. From Jon Stewart’s brilliant rant to the supportive tweets from Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore, Palin found defenders in quarters where she had previously found nothing but ridicule and scorn.
For those of you who were focusing on more important things over the last few days (such as the debt ceiling or the Weiner photos), here’s a quick recap of the Palin email story: After almost three years of legal haggling, the state of Alaska on Friday released over 24,000 pages of emails sent or received by Sarah Palin during her term as governor. Mother Jones and other media outlets had used the flimsiest of pretexts to demand the release of those emails: A local activist had suspected Palin of conducting some political activities on government time. If that’s the standard, then journalists should be poring through the emails of every single elected official in the country (starting with the president). And while they’re at it, they should investigate whether gambling was going on in Casablanca during World War II.
The media quickly forgot about the limited pretext for their supposedly compelling need to snoop through Palin’s emails. The project morphed into an open-ended fishing expedition in the hope of finding something — anything — that would make Palin look bad. The New York Times enlisted the help of its readers to find “interesting and newsworthy emails, people or events that we may want to highlight.” The Washington Post issued a similar call to crowd-source their hunt for dirt on Palin — as if they were inviting the entire community to participate in the stoning of a witch.
Journalists were so blinded by their Palin obsession that they lost sight of what their job is. Where there’s smoke, it’s a journalist’s job to investigate relentlessly to find the smoking gun. From Watergate to Weinergate, that’s been the model for investigative journalism.
The problem in this case was that there was no smoke. The journalists pre-selected their target — Palin — and sought access to her emails in an attempt to find smoke. That’s not investigative journalism — that’s called “opposition research,” which is what political operatives do to political opponents. Opposition research is the dark art of doing whatever it takes to find something that will take your opponent down.
Of course, traditional journalists are not supposed to treat political figures as political opponents. To most conservatives, the fact that journalists routinely do so is another “shocking” revelation in the gambling-in-Casablanca vein.
When the traditional media undermine their own credibility, it hastens the public’s retreat into the mutually exclusive echo chambers of advocacy media. We thus really are becoming, to quote John Edwards, two Americas — divided not by class but by ideology.
The traditional media reside overwhelmingly in only one of the two Americas. Liberals outnumber conservatives in journalism by about four to one, despite being outnumbered in the country as a whole by about two to one. It appears that the profession of journalism, which has become admirably more diverse over the years in terms of race, ethnicity, gender and sexual preference, values every type of diversity but diversity of thought.
In the America that most journalists inhabit, it is an article of faith that Sarah Palin in an idiot, worthy of virtually any insult or indignity. It is not surprising that the journalists of the New York Times and the Washington Post would see nothing wrong in inviting their fellow Americans to share in the excitement of searching through Palin’s emails. It was as if they were inviting the entire country to participate in a joyous Easter egg hunt, with prizes for sharp-eyed participants who could unearth confirmation of what everyone (in their America) already knew about Palin. Who knows what goodies you’ll find out there? Spelling errors? Bad grammar? Displays of historical ignorance? Bigotry? Evidence of — dare we get our hopes up — criminality? As they say in the Ancestry.com commercials, “You don’t have to know what you’re looking for. You just have to start looking.”
Any fair-minded person would be appalled at the media’s grotesque over-reach in this episode. The problem is that very few of us are fair-minded about people with whom we disagree politically. We all preach civility when it suits us, but almost exclusively to castigate our political opponents for their lack of civility. As for those on our side who launch personal attacks on the other side, well, those attacks don’t sound so bad to us because our guys are brilliant and witty and, by golly, they’re right on the underlying substance.
That’s why the recent expressions of sympathy for Palin by Stewart and others on the left is significant. Palin-haters, after all, routinely mock her as an idiot, call her the vilest of names (“dumb tw@t” was Bill Maher’s eloquent contribution to civil discourse), and even poke mean-spirited fun at Palin’s children — including her toddler with Down syndrome — as a way of attacking Palin. While the ugliest slurs against Palin have on rare occasions drawn grudging criticism from the left, the typical liberal reaction to anti-Palin vitriol is a polite rewording of “the b*tch deserved it.”
It really was a breakthrough, then, for the likes of Jon Stewart to be able to recognize that certain behavior can cross the line — even when it’s directed at Sarah Palin. Will partisans on the left and the right now be better able to feel each other’s pain? Not likely. But it’s strange to think that for one brief shining moment, Sarah Palin — that most polarizing figure in American politics — helped bring us all just a little closer together.
*****
David B. Cohen served in the administration of President George W. Bush as U.S. Representative to the Pacific Community, as Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Interior, and as a member of the President’s Advisory Commission on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders. He hosts the debate show “Beer Summit” for PBS Guam.
The author is mistaken. Liberal journalists do not outnumber conservatives ones by a margin of four to one. They outnumber conservative journalists by about ten to one.
They are quite literally drowning in their hate. What a life, to hate with such intensity.
How could they call it 3 years of legal haggling? She left the governorship in the summer of ‘09. We’re only now coming up on 2 years. Or is the arithmetic more sophisticated than that?
Per my observations of the MSM, you're being overly generous, but hey, that's a conservative trait, and I forgive you for it.
Über-Leftist David Corn asked for the e-mail under Alaska’s FOIA like a day after McQueeg selected her to be the Republican VP nominee.
Thank you.
The problem in this case was that there was no smoke. The journalists pre-selected their target — Palin — and sought access to her emails in an attempt to find smoke. That’s not investigative journalism — that’s called “opposition research,” which is what political operatives do to political opponents. Opposition research is the dark art of doing whatever it takes to find something that will take your opponent down."
We conservatives have been shouting from the rooftops for years, how liberally biased the MSM is, but this episode with the Palin emails proves something even more heinous.
It should now be clear to anyone with a functioning cerebral cortex that the MSM isn't just biased toward the liberal view, but that the industry is a virtual arm of the liberal Democrat party, and actively goes after conservatives, patriots, and Republicans who it wants to take down.
They've already lost all credibility with the right, and now it appears that they've lost at least some degree of credibility with many on the left.
Dude! This BS proves why she is a good and decent woman.
She has to run. I gave Michelle today and will give again in a few weeks but if Sarah runs, I’m gonna start writing checks.
IMO, at this time, there are only three maybe four possibles:
Cain
Bachman
Perry
My girl, Sarah.
(sorry, forgot the others names)
Let me xplain it 2 U:
Liberal + Math = ???
So some vitriolic PDS libs recognize that this behavior toward Palin and her children may be a bit over the top... and they deserve praise for that? HUH????
where is the speaker of the house demanding that the MSM stand down? Where is the minority leader defending one of the leaders of his party? where are the other POTUS candidates calling out the MSM for their Obama worship? where are the governors and congresspeople and senators that gov Palin helped win their seats?
this is has bad as the blood libel. these people do not deserve our support not one of them has the cajones and the moral fiber to call out the evil in our midst. not one.
True. Once again, the media tried unsuccessfully to create smoke. Just like all of those other tactics such as having a slimebag lib reporter rent the house next door to hers, sending droves of the scum to Anchorage to dig for dirt that never materialized...
The state-run media is terrified of Sarah Palin. And I'm sure they're extremely frustrated by now.
I hope she announces her candidacy soon.
It backfired on them and they know it. There’s nothing genuine about this and they are only shifting their tactics because they know this can be turned around on 0bama and them with this obvious bias and maliciousness. They are part of it even while they attempt to play like they don’t approve of it. Only after the fact when they didn’t find anything. Now what’s in 0bama’s records? They have opened this up and made it about them.
I can’t believe that some judge would actually grant a petitioner relief on such flimsy grounds.
After all politics is a vital part of a governor’s job. Nothing on a governor’s agenda would ever get done if he or she did not politic. A governor must build support for his agenda or the legislature will simply ignore the governor’s priorities for their own. That is politics.
But as the author states if that is the standard they had better look at the House and Senate which some reports say spend about 45% of their work day making calls for campaign contributions or seeing lobbyist who had better be packing campaign cash or they will be sent packing.
This is all an instinctive smokescreen. Let these nuisance suits go on for 2 1/2 years and then when, as jackals, they don’t get emails juicy enough to even really spin and all of a sudden they are proponents of squeaky clean journalism AND defenders of Palin? Please!
This is simply defense against similar blowback by the Pubbies (yeah, I know.)
Scratch the surface and they’re not upset that Palin continues to be smeared and ruthlessly investigated by the MSM, it’s that its keeping attention away from Zero and his re-election campaign. They all wouldn’t be wracked with PDS if they didn’t fear her. They are all still trying to justify and spinthe dem butt kicking last Nov.
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