Obama and Palin gaffes
President gets a pass where she would not
What would the mainstream media's response be if former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin described China's economic growth to an audience of students in Shanghai as "an accomplishment unparalleled in human history"? That is what the most inexperienced president in modern American history said in Shanghai this week.
I wonder whether any of the assembled journalists choked. President Obama makes such unhinged pronouncements with the kind of frequency that if he were anyone else, he would be set down by the media as a booby. I take that back. Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. is equally gaffable, yet no one in the mainstream press makes him out to be a booby. When he was tapped to be then-Sen. Obama's running mate, he was acknowledged widely - from ABC to NBC and all the like-minded newspapers in between - as a foreign-policy colossus.
Both of these men, when untethered from their tele-prompters, are prone to gibberish. Actually, I suspect that the president's Shanghai preposterosity appeared in the text rolling down his teleprompter. His speechwriters are as prone to the absurd as their boss. Nonetheless, Mr. Obama is reputed in the media to be an orator of great gifts, and, anyway, he is very charismatic. So, apparently, the journalists are insensate as the gaffes, the howlers, the jaw-dropping exaggerations roll forth.
Mrs. Palin is accorded no such dispensation. During the 2008 presidential campaign, in answering a foreign-policy query by Katie Couric about Russia's proximity to the state Mrs. Palin then served as governor, she was mocked for saying Russia is so close it can be seen from Alaska. Her explanation to Miss Couric, whose face was contorted in disbelief, contained the perfectly sensible observation that Alaska and Russia share "a very narrow maritime border." Neither that nor anything else the governor said was laughable. Still, the media laughed.
The media did not laugh when Miss Couric, at about the same time in the campaign, listened attentively to Mr. Biden claim that President Franklin D. Roosevelt had talked to a nonexistent television audience during the 1929 stock-market crash, four years before Roosevelt was president and even more years before there was a television audience. Miss Couric's respective countenance betrayed no evidence that she recognized that Herbert Hoover had been president then or that a television audience had been years from reality. Miss Couric, too, is a booby.
There is something odd about the media's present absorption with the pulchritudinous Mrs. Palin and her book tour. The media exalt her even as they disdain her. The weird phenomenon puts me in mind of the way the media treated scandalous tales of President Clinton's sex life. They covered the scandals in excruciating detail even as they sniffed that a politician's sex life (sex extravaganza) was beneath professional journalism's proper interest. Oh, and one other thing: The journalists who unearthed these stories, stories that would appear over and again in Mr. Clinton's White House, were unworthy of being dignified with the designation "journalist."
Actually, as Mrs. Palin began her book tour through rural America, it was the journalists who made the rural tour a stroke of public-relations genius. It was up to the journalists to cover it or not, and although Mrs. Palin is a candidate for absolutely nothing and is, in fact, a retired politician, the journalists followed her with their usual mixture of intense interest and contempt. They may not turn her into a presidential candidate, but they certainly have turned her into a celebrity. What we have here is still more evidence that the American journalists' proclaimed standards are not standards at all. American journalism is a chaos of subjectivity.
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/...-palin-gaffes/
Obama and Palin gaffes
Reply With Quote
