Palin Wants A More Credible Media
A shattered Republican Party this week began the difficult task of regrouping and rebuilding. So far this appears to be taking three distinct tracks.
Track one: work out what went wrong and try to fix it for next time. Track two: avoid blame at all costs by leaking as much dirt as possible to the Wall Street Journal. Track three: blame everything on the media and work out a way of abolishing the fourth estate as quickly as possible.
You may have guessed already but this third track is being spearheaded by none other than the rouged pitbull herself, Sarah Palin.
No sooner had she returned to Alaska than she was telling the world that she was “a little bit disappointed in my heart about the world of journalism today,” before going on to magnanimously state that “I’d like to… help restore some credibility there.”
While the world’s journalists are no doubt flattered that Palin is prepared to take time out from peering across the sea at Russia to help them, I suspect a few of them might be a little apprehensive about just what she might have in mind.
She has set herself quite a task. Even Fox News, that bastion of ignorace, failed to live up to Palin’s standards of “deference” and “respect” by revealing this week that an additional 70000 dollars was spent by Palin on “wardrobe items” during the campaign, a figure which brings the total outflow from the Macy’s slush fund to nearly a quarter of a million dollars. This shocking display of actual reporting by Fox was enough to trigger calls for a boycott by the rightwing bloggers at freerepublic.com.
Such a defection no doubt came as a shock to Palin, who I suspect was imagining the fourth estate could merely be thoroughly lobotomised, in such a way as to more closely resemble those halycon days in which the news consisted only of a nervous halfwit reading the sports results from a teleprompter.
Sadly no. The rot goes deeper. If even Fox is capable of the odd burst of journalistic integrity then surely “restoring some credibility there” requires more drastic measures. Does Palin now dream, Stasi-style, of rooms filled with men and permanent markers, carefully obliterating any mention of Africa’s status as a country or otherwise, expunging all reference to Todd Palin’s expensive taste in boxer shorts? Were her aborted efforts to ban books from the Wasilla public library just the beginning? Let’s hope we never know.
Leave a Reply