Media not to blame that Palin story line fell apart

[CatWoman]

he McCain campaign and much of the Republican Party are outraged at media coverage of Sarah Palin. McCain strategist Steve Schmidt set the tone perfectly Wednesday, whining about a “faux media scandal designed to destroy the first female Republican nominee.”

Well, cry me a river. Let’s take that claim apart, and let’s start with this:

A relative handful of columnists and commentators and a larger number of bloggers have indeed wondered in public about Palin’s decision to accept the nomination so soon after giving birth to a son with Down syndrome, a condition that requires a lot of attention, and when she has a 17-year-old unmarried pregnant daughter. How, they have asked, could Palin do right both by her family and her country?

To the McCain camp, such questions constitute a “vicious and scurrilous” media campaign to ruin a promising conservative candidate, using sexism to do it. Is that true?

Fortunately, we have a similar set of circumstances to compare against the Palin case.

In March of 2007, John Edwards decided to continue his presidential campaigning even after his wife was diagnosed with terminal cancer. The reaction will sound familiar.

Rush Limbaugh said the Edwardses were turning their eyes to the campaign when they instead should turn their eyes to God. Katie Couric, in a “60 Minutes” interview, accused Edwards of mining his wife’s condition for sympathy votes.

“Even those who may be very empathetic to what you all are facing might question your ability to run the country at the same time you’re dealing with a major health crisis in your family,” Couric told Edwards.

And in Time magazine, columnist Jay Carney wrote that “surely many average Americans have to be wondering at what point the candidate will decide that his duties as husband and father to three children, including a 6- and 8-year-old, trump his duty to his country and the cause of winning the White House.”

Edwards is a man; he is also a liberal. Yet, he faced the same questioning and second-guessing that Palin is now undergoing. Why? Because human beings are drawn to human stories, and the media have an economic incentive to tell those stories, regardless of political bent.

The McCain’s camp complaint about a media “feeding frenzy” focused on Palin is even more precious. John McCain chose to introduce a totally unknown player to the national scene at a critical point in the campaign, and he did so by portraying her as a gun-toting mother of five, riding out of the wilds of Alaska like a female John Wayne to clean up Washington.

And they claim to be shocked at the “feeding frenzy” they set off? In the first hours after the announcement, TV reporters had so little information about Palin that they were reduced to reading off Wikipedia for information. Of course, the media descended on Alaska to try to fill in the gaps as quickly as possible.

The story the McCain camp peddled was so appealing that Palin even drew coverage from Us magazine, People and National Enquirer, outlets that would never have wasted ink on a Kay Bailey Hutchison or Tim Pawlenty. Their interest was human, not political.

The real reason Schmidt is angry is because the reporting has shown that so much of the original McCain narrative was untrue.

Palin was cast as a reformer who fought the infamous “Bridge to Nowhere.” But in fact, she ran for governor in 2006 as a champion of the pork-barrel bridge and “opposed” it only after it was clear the project was dead. We were told that Palin abhors earmarks, the special congressional appropriations that Alaska politicians have used to bleed billions from the American taxpayer. But it turns out Palin fought to get earmarks both as mayor and as governor, hiring lobbyists and going to Washington herself to bring them home.

It’s not the media’s fault that the cinematic story envisioned by McCain and his staff has fallen apart on closer inspection. They just didn’t do their homework, and they got caught.

http://www.ajc.com/opinion/content/opinion/bookman/stories/2008/09/04/bookmaned_0904.html?imw=Y

[SoCalDem]

1. and we got a headstart.. we vetted her before THEY did:)

and most of us grabbed pictures & articles BEFORE they scrubbed the sites & goofed up all the captions & dates on the pictures :)

[EFerrari]

2. This Palin fiasco has made me miss my first MIL.

She's been gone for more than fifteen years. We used to have vodka gimlets, play cards and watch "Dallas" together while the guys slept off their dinner.

lol

[Supersedeas]

3. and yet the Media Free Ride continues

[gratuitous]

4. No wonder the GOP is mad at the media

Some of the reporters seem to have wandered off the reservation and done some actual reporting instead of merely repeating the lines fed to them by the RNC blast faxes. I'd be mad, too, if my tame little doggy suddenly piddled on the carpet. They had been trained so well! How in the world did they slip the leash and go off on their own like that?

[slackmaster]

5. I promise this is the last time I will post this visual metaphor on DU today...

[pampango]

6. You're coming dangerously close to complimenting the MSM - a risky

endeavor around here. :)

[karynnj]

7. Schmidt is a hypocrite - the questions on Palen mostly reflect the lack of vetting

She did lie in say she said "no thank you" on the Bridge to nowhere.
Her daughter is pregnant - and that story came into the MSM via the McCain campaign.
Other stories are in National Enquier.

It was her completely unnecessary and disturbing detail of an amniotic fluid leak that could only have come from her that led to the stories she complained of - that were all posed as THEORIES. There was NO ONE I saw saying - I was there and Sarah is not the mother.

Let's see what Schmit said in 2004, when known lies were spoken by people claiming to have been there, even when records said otherwise, speaking of Kerry's call for Bush to call out the SBVT.

""John Kerry knows that attack is false and baseless," said Bush campaign spokesman Steve Schmidt. "John Kerry knows that the president has said service was noble service. John Kerry knows that there is no connection between the Bush campaign and this 527 and . . . that President Bush has called on Sen. Kerry to join him in condemning all of the shadowy 527 groups that are advertising."
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/chi-0408220343aug22,0,7943320.story

This was, of course, a lie they were funded by Bush supporters from Texas and they shared a lawyer. (Not to mention nothing anyone has said of SP is even close to as nasty as what was said of Kerry.)

[jhain]

8. Mc Cain Campaign