Heard about another book .. ?
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Letting the Media Do Our Thinking: An Excerpt from ‘Bring Her Down’
My book, ‘Bring Her Down’: How the American Media Tried to Destroy Sarah Palin, has just been released. The following is adapted from Chapter 7 of the book.
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In the event of a possible Palin presidential run, it remains to be seen whether the media can pull off the same act with the same success twice. At first glance it would seem obvious that they can, because of the head start they’ve already given themselves.
To a large extent, they’ve already made her into a political punchline. Millions of voters would be coming to this hypothetical race with a set of preconceptions about Palin that would be very hard to shake.
There are those—including many conservatives—who insist that Palin can never run for national office again because she was so effectively “Dan Quayled” by the media. It’s an image, they argue, that can’t be overcome.
There’s something unsettling, though, about the idea that any politician—or any person—should resign himself or herself to being defined for all time by what the media says, particularly by the kind of grotesque caricature they created of Sarah Palin.
In a way it’s even worse than the “It’s her own fault” meme that was used against her so many times: when her e-mail account was hacked, when her children were mocked, and so on.
That meme at least assumed that she had a little bit of control over her own fate; the “She got Quayled and that’s it” meme suggests that the best thing that a political candidate damaged by the media can do is bow her head meekly and submit to her ordained fate.
On the other hand, in the process of creating those preconceptions, the media may have unwittingly thrown a few advantages Palin’s way
Rest
There has to be more ink on this brave woman than any other in such a short span of time!