Doing things in reverse today, first the punchline: The always pointed Daniel Larison (of The American Conservative) explains Palinonics — the method of decoding the governor’s record-breaking run-on sentences.

I have concluded that the problem that so many people have in understand what Palin is saying is that we make the mistake of assuming that all of the words have some reason for being there. What we have to do instead is decrypt her message by filtering out all of the confusing chatter that keeps her statements encoded and difficult to follow. Let’s take the first sentence, and identify the essential elements in bold:

“Sitting here in these chairs that I’m going to be proposing but in working with these governors who again on the front lines are forced to and it’s our privileged obligation to find solutions to the challenges facing our own states every day being held accountable, not being just one of many just casting votes or voting present every once in a while, we don’t get away with that.”

See? If you just cut out about 60% of what she says, it hangs together nicely … Once reporters and voters acquire sufficient training in Palinonics, there should be no more misunderstandings.

*  *  *  *  *

Another trip to Louisville, another visit with my sister-in-law. She’s really awesome, and of some importance in the GOP of that quite large metropolitan city. She has no problem talking about the faults and flaws of her GOP colleagues locally, and even on a statewide level. However, she’s still under the illusion that Sarah Palin was unfairly “railroaded” by the media. So, as a member (albeit a lowly one) of “the media,” I feel compelled to explain that while “media bias” exists, it’s not really equivalent to what Republican propaganda has long made it out to be.

The day Sarah Palin was announced as McCain’s VP pick, the national media was utterly shocked — and that’s a pretty tall order, since this sort of news generally “leaks” from somewhere, but in this case stayed secret until just hours before the announcement. Coverage of the story from then on was relatively positive, although there were questions on “is she the best pick?” and — appropriately, given the McCain campaign’s penchant for trying to grab the news cycle without making actual news — “is this a stunt?”

Conventional wisdom has is that the media turned on Palin when it was clear she wouldn’t “play the media game,” i.e. answer straightforward questions whose relevance never would have been questioned had they been asked to McCain, Obama or Biden. Charlie Gibson’s “Bush doctrine” inquiry was admittedly strange, but overall he was easy on her; Katie Couric’s much-ballyhooed “what newspapers do you read?” question was actually a follow-up (this escapes everyone’s notice) to a previous Palin answer, that she has plenty of foreign policy knowledge from “reading newspapers.” These were terrible moments for Palin, to be sure, but there’s no reason to acquit the defendant simply because you don’t like the tone of the prosecutor.

The truth of the matter is that the press did display some bias toward Palin, but what it stemmed from was not her ideology or policy views or even her debateable lack of experience. No, it came from a very natural human place: Resentment. Resentment because Palin, unlike every other presidential and vice presidential nominee in history, decided she was going to sidestep the press, waiting weeks after her nomination before giving her first interview to a reporter. Resentment because while she played the usual GOP game — blame the press — she didn’t fulfill the paired obligation, which is to not believe the rhetoric too much and to just do the interviews.

This notion that the press “hated” Palin isn’t accurate, and the charge of unfairness really doesn’t stick in my view. A huge and hilarious portion of the “SNL” version of the Palin-Couric interview was actually done word-for-word from the interview’s transcript, and the Couric questions were relatively innocuous. The Palin answers, though, were at once empty and yet entirely convoluted, just like the quote mentioned at the top of this post. And this is another point in favor of the media.

You see, when I hire people, I can pretty easily tell during a job interview whether a person is answering me a.) honestly and knowledgeably, b.) honestly but ignorantly, or c.) trying to sound knowledgeable but actually saying nothing and thus telling me that not only are they unqualified, but that I shouldn’t trust them either. Shouldn’t reporters, who do these kinds of interviews on a much more frequent basis, be that much more able to tell when they’re getting BS’d?

That’s the other part of “media bias”: We’re biased against people whose prime currency is BS. Maybe that’s not who Sarah Palin is; maybe it was the fault of the McCain campaign. But these answers and others took away any sympathies reporters (who, strictly speaking, shouldn’t have much sympathy for anyone) ever had for her.

Tags: B.S., media bias, Sarah Palin

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 12th, 2008 at 8:51 pm and is filed under Uncategorized, politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.