This is how petty we’ve gotten! Just by reading my blog post’s title, I’ve angered half of you and tantalized the other half. Calm down people… all I did was mention her name. Read what I have to say before you get carried away.
The media has has recently been delivered boxes full of correspondence from the office of Governor Sarah Palin, in compliance with a freedom of information act, and is asking for the publics help to read through the documents in search of “juicy bits”. An example of this indignant call to arms (source) :
Our US crack correspondents Ewen MacAskill and Ed Pilkington will be holed up in a Juneau hotel room combing through thousands of Palin emails as fast as they can read, while Richard Adams in Washington will be live-blogging whatever they – and our US colleagues – find here.
But given the size of the cache, we reckon the collective eyes of thousands of you will find the juicy bits more quickly, so we’ll be publishing the raw mails on our website as quickly as we can and asking you to tell us which ones are interesting and why.
They’ll be pretty rough and ready – no headlines or details of what they’re about – but we hope you’ll help us by using our simple system to tag them according to what subjects they cover, and how interesting they are.
We’d love it if you’d alert our editors, via a button on each email, or Tweet us at @gdnpalin, about any emails that you think our reporters should be examining. Remember that each numbered document represents a single page, so you have to click to previous and subsequent pages to see a full email. Now, as Ms Palin once exhorted: “Drill baby, drill!”
This in and of itself, I have no issue with — if you’re going to place yourself in the spot light as a politician this is par for the course. Your dealings via any media correspondence should be public record and producible for perusement, no matter how petty. My issue comes in with the priorities of the news organization.
I didn’t have to look hard for this civic-duty-request-for-help — in fact, I didn’t have to look at all. It was practically thrown at me from my various online news sources. These people aren’t messing around… they are super serious about digging up dirt on Sarah Palin. However, to put things back in proper perspective, I came across just a snippet of another story, a story that I had to Dig to get the full scoop on: as it turns out, our fearless leader’s latest foreign policy debacle would involve handing over US national security information to the USSR. From Foreign Policy Magazine (source):
President Barrack Obama’s administration recently threatened to veto the defense budget, citing “serious concerns” over provisions that limit the U.S. missile defense know-how that the White House is permitted to share with Moscow. This is the sort of information that Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, in his earlier days, would have assigned his spies to steal. Through its single-minded pursuit of “resetting” relations with Russia, the Obama administration may simply be willing to hand over this information and, in doing so, weaken U.S. national security.
Maybe I’m just old fashioned… but a news story about digging up dirt on a former Vice-Presidential candidate shouldn’t be able to hold a candle to one describing a very real threat to American life. Allow me to paraphrase:
Your take on the American journalism scene may be different from mine, but scrounging for tabloid news in volumes of irrelevant emails and addressing the very real concern of missile defense compromise ain’t the same freaking ball park. It ain’t even the same league. It ain’t even the same freaking sport. Look, 10 years from now, Mrs Palin’s emails won’t mean a thing; but this missile defense policy… that could come back to byte us. (If you don’t get the Pulp Fiction reference, don’t worry about it.)
Regardless of your political affiliations, and personal take on Sarah Palin, can’t we ALL agree that national security should trump tabloid, sensationalized trash every time?
