NRL News
Page 14
November/December 2009
Volume 36
Issue 11-12

What the Media Going Bonkers over Palin’s Going Rogue Tells Us

By Dave Andrusko

When I cranked up the computer that morning and typed “Sarah Palin” into the Google News search engine, there were about 18,000 “hits” covering the period of the previous 18 hours. November 17, of course, was the official unveiling of the former pro-life GOP vice presidential candidate’s memoir Going Rogue. I purchased my copy at 10:30 a.m. (I learned later, from the Associated Press, that Going Rogue sold 700,000 copies its first week, and that HarperCollins increased its initial printing run from 1.5 million to 2.5 million.)

That morning the Washington Post had three stories (which took up almost the entirety of the front page of the “Style” section), two snarky op-eds which competed for the “honor” of trashing the former Alaska governor most maliciously, and a curmudgeonly column by the media columnist Howard Kurtz. Other prominent newspapers had their say—mostly “No!”—about her 413-page book, which became a bestseller based on pre-orders months before it was published.

I could devote the next couple of thousand words to giving you a sampling of the torrent of deeply personal insult, but why bother? Let me instead try to figure out what’s going on. What is it about Sarah Palin that brings out the absolute worst in people who don’t require a lot of provocation to be ugly in the first place?

Is it tooting our own horn to say that it begins with her strongly pro-life position? I think it is self-evident that while the Media Establishment would have loathed Palin anyway, what changed distaste and disdain into loathing was her unapologetic support for our cause. (The hysteria over her willingness to stand up publicly for life is intertwined with resentment over the simple fact that all this attention was going to the “wrong” kind of woman—a.k.a. someone who was not a pro-abortion feminist.)

This gets very complicated, if you think about it very long. Palin invited being drawn into the media’s crosshairs because she was both a mother and a governor who potentially could be the vice president of the United States. If that sounds wildly out of step with 21st-century America—dissing a woman for having both a family and a prominent career—it tells you how much many commentators hated having her on the Republican presidential ticket.

Then, Palin compounded her offense by carrying a baby she knew had Down syndrome to term. Instead of hailing her for her strength, courage, and pluck, almost the entire Media Establishment went after her hammer and tong. (They piously inquired how could she be a good mother to her other children, let alone be vice president, if she made the “mistake” of not aborting this child. The section in Going Rogue where Palin talks about what went through her heart and mind when she learned that “Trig” would have Down syndrome is amazing reading that makes you admire the Palin family immensely.)

If that weren’t bad enough, Palin’s unmarried teenage daughter, Bristol, had become pregnant. When this became known (as Palin writes in Going Rogue), “I was amazed at how many liberal pundits seemed floored by a pregnant teenager, as if overnight they’d all snuck out and had traditional-values transplants. The talking heads began to parrot one line: ‘If Sarah Palin can’t control her own daughter, how can she serve as vice president?’”

What they couldn’t understand, and never will be able to understand now or ever, is that none of us is so foolish as to believe that our own families are not susceptible to making the same mistakes everyone else makes. Our unmarried daughters can get pregnant and pro-life women can contemplate having abortions. And they don’t get pregnant on their own.

Palin writes that when the news about Bristol’s pregnancy broke, “The tone some reporters (and many bloggers) seemed to want to set was one of ‘hypocrisy’”—which is for many of the chattering class the only “sin.” That we sometimes—or even many times—fall short of our aspirations is not hypocrisy. It is reflection of something with which pro-lifers are thoroughly familiar: the human condition.

Like you, I have followed Palin’s career since she was chosen to be Sen. John McCain’s running mate. That I admire the heck out of her does not mean that I think she was incapable of making mistakes or that she didn’t make mistakes during the campaign.

Referring to her interview with CBS’s Katie Couric, Palin writes, “I have had better interviews ... I choked on a couple of responses, and in the harried pace of the campaign, I mistakenly let myself become annoyed and frustrated with many of her repetitive, biased questions.”

But that Palin is human, like all the rest of us, seems to activate the worst impulses not only in the usual suspects, but also in some whose hostility you wouldn’t expect. Why?

The condescending media stereotype of Palin as a hopelessly out of her league lightweight was set in stone following her interviews with ABC’s Charles Gibson and (especially) Couric. This gave free rein to bash her unmercifully, and by extension all of us who attended the “wrong” schools and who regularly fail to be invited to the “right” parties.

(Am I exaggerating? Is this the same “whining” that her critics hammer her about? The full fury of a legion of reporters and commentators and bloggers say things about her and her family that they wouldn’t say about Nidal Hasan. If she responds, Palin is “whining.” If she doesn’t, of course, she is a wuss. Palin can’t win. But I digress.)

While Palin’s defenders—and even some of her more sober-minded critics—often mention the blatant sexism at work, the assault on her is equally driven by classism. When I skimmed some of those 18,000 hits, again and again I read about how scandalous it was that a one-term governor could have the audacity to even think about running for President.

How dare she! After all, Palin is “not one of us,” a trespass for which she can never, ever be forgiven.

Speaking of audacity, how about that one-term senator who seems to have given his full attention to the Senate for about a year before he began running for President? While Harvard-educated Barack Obama is constantly touted as our first president of Mensa-like intellect, what stands out is that without a Teleprompter, he is dazzlingly inarticulate.

The Associated Press, once upon a time a nonpartisan source of straight-shooting news, went after Going Rogue as if there were no tomorrow. Eleven reporters assisted the main writer in fact-checking the book. (This obviously reminds us of CNN “fact-checking” a Saturday Night Live sketch that ever-so-mildly criticized Obama. Wonder what that tells us.)

Palin supporters have refuted the charges, but that is not the point. Think back to the way the media treated Obama’s two books.

Did anybody “fact-check” them, or were they too busy writing (as did the New York Times of Dreams from My Father) that Obama’s “appreciation of the magic of language and his ardent love of reading have not only endowed him with a rare ability to communicate his ideas to millions of Americans while contextualizing complex ideas about race and religion”? Ah, yes, the “complexity” of it all.

Well, worrying about double standards seems a particularly unproductive use of our time. A far better use would be reading Going Rogue.