The vast left-winged conspiracy.
JournoGate Continued: Pouncing On Palin
Has the media's liberal cabal ever let Americans get to know Sarah Palin?
Media Bias: Ever wonder why 2008 VP candidate Sarah Palin was so ridiculed before much was known about her? Turns out liberal journalists engaged in a coordinated smear campaign to aid the Democratic ticket.
When we talked with Alaska's then-governor in the summer of 2008 about plans to develop her state's energy resources, she came across like most other Alaskans we've met ? frank, down-to-earth, colloquial, but more than technocratically knowledgeable about the energy field.
The issue then for Gov. Palin was how to balance the development of Alaska's bountiful resources with its near-pristine environment. She also wrestled with how to create a healthy business climate in a state with a history of political corruption involving oil companies.
We detected a sense of duty as Palin spoke of bringing natural gas to the Lower 48, and we were impressed with the way she spoke authoritatively about Alaska's polar bear population and compassionately about the well-being of native Alaskans. We also interviewed longtime nonpolitical Alaskan bureaucrats who raved about working with the governor and praised her executive ability
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Sound like the Sarah Palin you read about when she was chosen as John McCain's running mate that fall? Hardly.
Suddenly Palin became a backwoods Christian fundamentalist hillbilly with five kids who couldn't possibly be who she said she was. Her intelligence was attacked, her accomplishments belittled, her verbal slips ridiculed, her family's privacy invaded and her clean record smeared with accusations of corruption, all of which proved false.
Now it's clear what was really going on. On Thursday, the Daily Caller published exchanges from a private forum called JournoList that showed how 400 top mainstream reporters and their activist buddies conspired in an attack against Palin the minute she entered the presidential race.
Wrote Daniel Levy of the Century Foundation: "This seems to me like an occasion when the nonofficial campaign has a big role to play in defining Palin, shaping the terms of the conversation and saying things that the official (Obama) campaign shouldn't say ? very hard-hitting stuff, including some of the things that people have been noting here (on JournoList) ? scare people about having this woefully inexperienced, no foreign policy/national security/right-wing christia (sic) wing-nut a heartbeat away."
"What a joke," added Jeffrey Toobin, a staff writer at the New Yorker and a senior analyst at CNN.
Ryan Donmoyer of Bloomberg News warned the forum bloggers that Palin's decision against aborting her baby with Down syndrome represented a threat to Obama because it was a "heartwarming" story. Politico's Ben Adler (now at Newsweek) said Palin should be criticized because campaigning would take her away from her baby.
And so it went ? journalists from the Nation, Mother Jones, Time, Politico, Bloomberg cooking up approaches, arguments, "narratives" and templates to paint a false picture of the candidate.
There are so many things wrong with this, we hardly know where to start. Nominally competitors, these supposedly impartial media mavens colluded in a way that would put airline or insurance officials in the dock for anti-competitive practices. They engaged in activism instead of fact-finding and mixed incestuously with activists whom they also should have been covering impartially.
Worst of all, they deprived millions of Americans of the information they needed to size up this new face on the political scene and determine if she really was a candidate who represented their interests.
That still remains to be done ? and the country is poorer for it.
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JournoGate Continued: Pouncing On Palin - IBD - Investors.com
