The media: Once again, the enemy

“This has not been the Fourth Estate’s finest hour,” said Ruben Navarette in The San Diego Union Tribune. In the days following John McCain’s announcement that Sarah Palin was his running mate, the media was mocking the conservative Palin for her small-town upbringing, her lack of experience, and her pregnant teenage daughter. With unabashed sexism, pundits dismissed Palin as “a pretty face with no substance.” No hard feelings, said William Kristol in The Weekly Standard. By treating Palin and her family with such “smugness and mean-spiritedness,” the media has only reminded ordinary Americans of the Left’s disdain for them, and rallied a critical voting bloc to the McCain-Palin ticket. For that, the media deserves “a special thank-you.”

On behalf of the entire elitist, biased media, said Roger Simon in the Chicago Sun-Times, let me apologize. Where were our manners? A woman most Americans have never heard of gets tapped to be the next vice president, and instead of welcoming her with hugs, we ask vicious and irrelevant questions such as, “Who is Sarah Palin? What is her record? Where does she stand on the issues? And is she qualified to be a heartbeat away from the presidency? Bad questions. Bad media. Bad.” As it turns out, those were excellent questions, said Jay Bookman in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. We now know that Palin, “cast as a reformer who fought the infamous ‘Bridge to Nowhere,’” initially supported that exorbitant pork project; had previously won $27 million in federal pork for her tiny hometown of Wasilla, Alaska; and, as governor, claimed thousands of dollars in travel expenses for 312 nights she spent at home and for transporting her kids and husband around the state. These are facts that voters should know about.

Both sides are being disingenuous here, said Howard Kurtz in The Washington Post. Some pundits and columnists certainly brought “a touch of condescension” to their coverage of Palin’s debut, but within a week, “many of the same media gurus” were hailing Palin as the new face of American conservatism. As for the truly sleazy and vicious attacks on Palin, they never really made it beyond the Internet. The McCain campaign knows that, said Jay Carney in Time, but by conflating reputable news outlets, snarky TV pundits, and typo-ridden leftist blogs into a single evil entity, they get to rally their base, and rebrand an otherwise flat campaign as “an all-out war on the media.”

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