Palin’s e-mails: Much ado about nothing?

In the end there were “no bombshells” and “no ‘gotcha’ moments,” said Becky Bohrer in the Associated Press. The state of Alaska released thousands of e-mails last week covering Sarah Palin’s two-and-a-half-year tenure as governor, prompting salivating critics to hunt for proof of lavish personal expenditure and abuses of power. But the 24,000 pages of documents revealed little more than the correspondence of “an image-conscious, driven leader” carrying out the “day-to-day duties of running the state.” In what some critics called “a witch hunt,’’ hundreds of journalists searched for something newsworthy, said Jeremy W. Peters in The New York Times. MSNBC, Politico, The Washington Post, and my own newspaper recruited small armies of editors, reporters, and even readers to scour the mountain of e-mails. Since Palin is flirting with running for president, the news organizations said, her old e-mails might contain “information the public was entitled to know.”

All that they turned up, said Armstrong Williams in The Hill, was the “biggest non-story story” in recent memory. The key revelations: Palin gets upset when critics attack her and her family, is image-conscious and ambitious, and doesn’t trust the press. Shocking! Just think of the real issues that “never got the scrutiny this one is getting,” said the New Hampshire Union Leader. How many newspapers assembled teams of dozens of reporters to “explain the details of Obamacare or the auto bailouts or the federal stimulus spending?” Clearly, the news media needs to reassess its priorities.

But Palin isn’t just any former governor, said Andrew Gumbel in the London Observer. She’s a “revolutionary leader’’ of the Tea Party rebellion, “a reality TV star’’ and Fox News commentator, and, with the exception of Barack Obama, the most famous—and controversial—politician in America. And let’s not forget that the media never got to see 953 Palin e-mails or parts of 2,300 others that friendly Alaska officials deemed to be covered by executive or attorney/client privilege. In the e-mails that were released, said Molly Ball in Politico.com, there was one genuine surprise. Before she was chosen to run for vice president, Palin sounded reasonable, pragmatic, and sincerely interested in governing Alaska. She boldly took on oil companies, built bridges to Democrats, and even used to believe in global warming. So how did a “popular, charismatic, competent woman of the people” turn into the divisive, resentment-filled partisan we know today?

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