Should Governor Palin Call Out The Media?

Don Surber doesn’t think Governor Palin should call out the Associated Press on their “fact checking”:

I would not do it. Going to war with the Associated Press is as dumb as going to war with Fox News. Sarah Palin should leave the criticism of the media to others. We like our leaders a little above the fray.

Surber is a lively blogger but as an old fashioned newspaperman he still has ink in his veins... Dan Riehl has a very different view:

Because of media advances made in the last several years, Sarah Palin doesn't have to go over the media's head. She can go right through them. It appears to me that's precisely what she intends to do. Don't be surprised if it works, even as the media and some old-line politicos point how what a bad idea it is. If those folks had truly good ideas, most of the country wouldn't be so upset with them right now. But that's just another thing old media and large portions of the political class seem to be missing.

Riehl is right on the button here. Until recently the old media commanded the walls guarding the information highway. Politicians could only get their message out via the media and this made editors and proprietors key figures for the political class. As for the ordinary man and woman in the street they played the role of factory workers in the old Soviet Union – everything was done in their name but it was the party that told them what they really wanted.

Same with the media – remember it was only yesterday that writing a “letter to the editor” was the biggest way of letting off steam... and, of course, the editor decided which letters should be published.

Yesterday the unrelenting media assault would have “quayled” Governor Palin and, after the events of last November, she would have disappeared back to Alaska never to be heard of again until 2028 in one of those “Twenty Years Ago Today” pieces that the media loves to use to fill up some slack news time. The national GOP bigwigs, taking their cue from the Alaska Republican establishment, would have sidelined her and, with their beltway coterie of consultants and strategists, would, even now, be grooming the latest empty suit to lead them forth into the battle of the bland... and her supporters, shorn of any means of regular mass contact would either sink into a political torpor or peg their noses and vote as directed by the machine.

But the internet has torn down those walls – and just as twenty years ago East Germans could finally elbow their way past the border guards and the security police, so today more and more ordinary folk have realised that the secret mysteries of “journalism” are as meaningless and insignificant as the empty entrail gazing rituals of some long dead Babylonian temple priest.

Indeed, the internet has not just provided Sarah Palin with the means of by passing the old media to get her message across but it has also helped to create and sustain her supporters, The Palin Nation, even in the darkest days, by providing platforms like C4P to defend her interests and to familiarise themselves with the stratagems and schemes of her opponents.

Several months ago, as an observer from across the pond, ever fascinated by American politics, I just couldn’t get Sarah Palin out of my head and I posted a blog, later picked up by C4P, in which I likened her to one of my other heroes, General de Gaulle...

De Gaulle was relatively unknown to the French people in 1940 but millions of them heard his broadcast from London at the moment of their deepest despair and in those few minutes he became the inspiration and hope for so many. Governor Palin walked onto the stage at the Republican Convention, electrified millions and stole their hearts forever with her grace, her honesty and her love of life sealing there and then a contract and covenant of support through fire and flood whatever may happen. Camille Paglia called her an immensely talented politician whose time had not yet come. But perhaps, one day, just as in 1958 with de Gaulle, a message will go across Canada to the north saying her time has come – and then the banners must unfurl...

I think it’s the time – don’t you?