The Clueless Class
By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY
Tuesday, September 02, 2008 4:20 PM PT
Journalism: The national media are based in New York and Washington, D.C., and don't always get the rest of the country as they should. That may help explain the coverage of Sarah and Bristol Palin.
John McCain asked for, and got, a perfect storm of ignorance and condescension when he picked Sarah Palin as his running mate. Geographically, politically and culturally, Palin is about as far from Manhattan and the Beltway as you can get.
She's not even from Rush Limbaugh's "flyover America," which is in the Lower 48. She's from Alaska, where people shoot moose for the same reason the rest of us go to Costco — to stock up on food. She's also a Republican, Christian conservative, a gun owner and a mother of five children.
Maybe millions of people see themselves in her, but few if any of them work in the mainstream media. Hence some of the early snap judgments about her inexperience. Over the past two years she has singlehandedly upended Alaska politics, but (outside conservative circles) that story didn't penetrate D.C. or New York.
So Sally Quinn, the ultimate D.C. insider who knows everything and everyone in the nation's capital, says: "From what little we know about her, she seems to be a bright, attractive, impressive person." Gail Collins at the New York Times smirks, "There's a lot we don't know yet about Palin, and I am personally looking forward to deconstructing her role in the Matanuska Maid Dairy-closing crisis."
"Palin seemingly came out of nowhere," says the Associated Press, and it's been duly noted that she has never appeared on NBC's "Meet the Press" — though we're sure she will get her chance now.
What do all these reporters and pundits have in common? For one thing, they are not kicking themselves for ignoring Palin and being caught off-guard by a big story.
To the contrary, instead of admitting they may have been out of touch, they use their own ignorance to argue that Palin lacks the experience to be vice president: We haven't heard of her, so she must not be any good.
The news that Sarah Palin's daughter Bristol is pregnant and not yet married gave the national media a chance to parade another form of cluelessness, this time cultural. Despite Barack Obama's decent admonition to leave a 17-year-old girl alone, CNN and the New York Times jumped all over the story, judging it newsworthy (and Larry King-worthy) for reasons not made fully clear.
For CNN, it was one of the two big stories on Labor Day, the other being Hurricane Gustav (the Republican convention was a distant third). Why this zeal to break the longstanding rule of respecting family privacy even for presidential candidates? To judge from all the commentary, some people wanted to make a point about the futility of abstinence-only sex education.
But others seemed to hope that the Bristol Palin story would provoke some evangelical backlash against McCain. Here's Quinn again: "This may be a hard one for the Republican conservative family-values crowd to swallow."
If anything, however, Bristol Palin's story seems to have inspired a new sense of common ground in conservative women.
One GOP delegate, Sue Sharkey, told National Review's Byron York that the news brought her back to her own past, when she was pregnant and out-of-wedlock at 17. She chose to have her son and "from that point I realized that I was a very strong right-to-life advocate."
If we were to guess what millions of religious conservatives are thinking now, we'd say most of them see a girl who erred but who is dealing with the consequences of her error courageously. Her family would also get high marks for supporting her.
Had media outlets like CNN understood this, they probably would have dropped the story on the grounds that it was too helpful to Sarah Palin and her cause.
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