How TV created, then destroyed, Sarah Palin

"The Palin buzz has gone," says John Doyle in The Globe and Mail. The presidential ambitions once harbored by the former Alaska governor are all but dead, with even the Republican base rating her in polls as "strongly unfavorable." And if there's one thing to blame for her short-lived national political career, it's television. It was TV, of course, that brought Palin to fame in the first place, as an "emanation of the reality-TV culture." The idea that the most ordinary person could be a compelling public figure was central to Palin's popularity. She was "authentic, populist and dismissive of sophistication in thought and action." Here, an excerpt:

Television duly destroyed the Palin authenticity. The arc of her national political career began with a defining speech at the Republican National Convention in September, 2008, and ended in November, 2010, a few episodes into "Sarah Palin’s Alaska." The show, a cringingly inevitable reality-TV series, gave her a huge platform and she blew it.

...Television is not kind to blatant hubris and hypocrisy and the series amounted to an epic failure to enhance Palin’s status as the genuine voice of authentic America... The flow of "Sarah Palin’s Alaska" amounted to a river of platitudes and patently insincere assertions. Palin failed to play television as an instrument.

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Read the entire piece at The Globe and Mail.