Failure of the Press

Before getting to the meat of this post, I want to follow up briefly on the previous post. As I indicated there, I was leaning McCain but still undecided. That ended with Obama's acceptance speech. For all his talk about being new and being about change, when the time came to put some substance into his message it was nothing more than the same tired socialist agenda I've been hearing from the Dem's since I started paying attention. No thank you.

Now, onto the subject that has everyone buzzing: Palin.

I'm just shocked and appalled at the new low the left has gone to in attacking Governor Palin, and I'm equally appalled that several mainstream media outlets have dropped any vestige of journalistic ethics and become de facto advocates for the Obama campaign.

The Daily Kos "scoop" was libelous, pure and simple. But it wasn't surprising for them, which is a sad commentary on the standing of politics in this country. What is surprising is how far others have gone, including organizations like CNN and the New York Times. There's so much that's out of bounds it's ridiculous. For starters, you have an apparently hard-news reporter on CNN using the revelation of Bristol's pregnancy to advance the Democratic talking point about sex-ed needing to include instruction on contraception instead of just abstinence (I point that I happen to agree with), saying that the Governor can't raise her own daughter according to her values. A reporter shouldn't be doing that at all for any issue. Adding insult to injury, it isn't even a legitimate point. None of these commenters (or reporters) know whether the Palin's taught their daughter about contraception or whether such parental advice--or different public education--would have made a difference. They're using a personal, private family situation to make a cheap political point. We do expect politicians to make cheap political points (e.g. capitalizing on the "7 homes" gaffe), but as Obama has correctly noted, family members, especially children, are off limits. Well, not for CNN, and others apparently.

But it gets worse. The NYT had to put 3 front-page stories up about Palin's family. One of them was particularly atrocious. With the thinnest of veils ("Ms. Palin has set off a fierce argument among women"), the NYT proceeds to pose questions about "whether there are enough hours in the day for her to take on the vice presidency, and whether she is right to try" because apparently women can't be mothers and seek office too. How far we've come. The entire article mentions her husband once: "Ms. Palin’s husband, Todd, seems like a supportive spouse." No mention of what his share of the domestic duties are. Or how about this gem they plucked from an Obama supporter: "You can juggle a BlackBerry and a breast pump in a lot of jobs, but not in the vice presidency."" Or the invocation of Jane Swift, a failed Republican acting governor who wasn't up to the task: "Ms. Leive cited the cautionary tale of Jane Swift, a Republican who gave birth to twin girls in 2001 while acting governor of Massachusetts and then, her popularity ratings low in part because of her prior use of aides as baby sitters, dropped out of the 2002 primary race for election in her own right. Later she attributed her struggles to the difficulties of balancing work and family.
“I know now that it was virtually impossible for me to take advice and make decisions when I was responding emotionally as a mother, not thinking rationally as a public official,” she wrote in an essay in Boston magazine."

Oh, so because Palin is also a woman, of course she's going to be incompetent, just like Swift! Women, or at least mothers, are apparently incapable of rational thinking in the NYT's view.

I think Senator Thompson was right yesterday, about the left and the media being in a panic. They can't stomach the thought of a conservative woman having a career and a family, and they're going to do whatever they can to bring her down before she has a chance to get her message across. Hopefully, she (and both campaigns, for that matter) will be able to steer the discussion back to the issues ASAP.

At least Peggy Noonan at the Wall Street Journal got the press's role in this right:

This is true: fact is king. Information is king. Great reporting is what every honest person wants now, it's the one ironic thing we have less of in journalism than we need. But reporting that carries an agenda, that carries Bubblehead assumptions and puts them forth as obvious truths? Well, some people want that. But if I were doing a business model for broadsheets and broadcast networks I'd say: Fact and data are our product, we're putting everything into reporting, that's what we're selling, interpretation is the reader's job, and think pieces are for the edit page where we put the hardy, blabby hacks.

That was a long way of saying: Dig deep into Sarah Palin, get all you can, talk to everybody, get every vote, every quote, tell us of her career and life, she may be the next vice president. But don't play games. And leave her kid alone, bitch.