And, how many people outside the legal profession give a shit who the president of the Harvard Law Review is? Likewise if Palin had written a book when she was mayor of Wasilla, nobody would have cared.
As other posters here have mentioned, Palin right now is far more famous than Obama was at any point prior to his announcing his presidential candidacy. And you have to remember for a long time he was considered something of a dark horse candidate (no pun intended). When he published “Audacity of Hope,” in 2006 he was one of at least a half-dozen Democrats whose names were being thrown around as possible contenders. And most serious political pundits were all but finalizing coronation plans for Hillary.
Palin right now is one of most prominent people, if not the most prominent person in the Republican Party.
Thing is Sarah Palin is known to be fast and loose with the truth. Repeatedly. Over and over again. Nobody needs to work hard to find the errors. It is not nitpicking. She is chock full of blatant inaccuracies (outright lies, see below for a partial list). As I mentioned earlier it is like shooting fish in a barrel to pick her apart.
Then consider her fame. A fame she actively seeks. Hell, there is almost no other way to parse her stepping down as Governor of Alaska than that she wanted to stay on the stage and in the spotlight and garner money which she could not have done had she remained Governor. In short, she puts herself there.
It would have been trivial for her or her publisher to have fact checked her book before publishing. She had HUGE pre-orders for the book. They knew they would be making a lot of money so the added expense would be trivial. They chose not to. The inaccuracies must be willful.
So, when Palin puts out a book and it is big news it can be no wonder that people fall over themselves finding what new turd piles she has laid.
Will Fox do the same then and admit to being a shill for the Republican party? :rolleyes:
Au contraire, Shodan I most certainly read through your paragraph and the whole of your post.
It was as unpersuasive as have been all your attempts to claim that Obama was as much in the spotlight in 06 as in Palin is now.
Once again, where is the evidence of lack of fact-checking into Obama’s writings?
Driving in to work today, I was listening to NPR covering a crowd of people who waited in line (some for 12 hours) at a mall in Grand Rapids, MI, yesterday to pick up a copy of the book and meet her and get their book signed.
Every single one of the people interviewed said, in their discussion of her, that one of the things they admired about her was her honesty, and how she was completely honest and forthright in everything she did and said, when no other politician was that way. Every. Single. One.
I thought “are you people living on the same planet as the rest of us?”
As a reporter, let me make a few observations:
_ When “Audacity of Hope” came out, it was not in any way the Event that “Going Rogue” is. It was to Palin’s book as “Pan’s Labrynth” was to “Lord of the Rings.” It was Hillary Duff to Lindsay Lohan. In other words, it simply wasn’t as newsworthy.
_ The kind of stand-alone fact check stories under discussion here are something of a new trend. They weren’t nearly as common when “Audacity” came out.
_ Once Obama became big news, reporters constantly referred back to “Audacity” to check its facts and compare what he was saying on the campaign trail to what he had written. His political opponents did the same. However, there probably weren’t stand-alone stories just on “Audacity” and its accuracy.
_ “Audacity” is still being fact-checked in the sense that organizations like Politifact and FactCheck compare what he’s saying now to what he wrote then and whether it was accurate.
When you have somebody with a long and stories history of telling lies like Sarah Palin then it’s inevitable that an entire book written by her will come under scrutiny.
Especially when it’s a book that describes very recent public events that pretty much everyone around actually lived through. It’s not like we’re talking about the historical events surrounding the founding of Juneau or something…we’re talking about the most recent presidential election, approximately one year ago.
Oh Shodan, you’re just being pathetic here. Palin is a very recent candidate for Vice-President, and her massively high-profile candidacy has made her into a universally recognized household name at this time, at a level of public awareness that is orders of magnitude beyond Obama’s in 2006 when he had no national campaign on his resume. Yes, Palin is a current non-candidate for national office, but emphatically not “in exactly the same way” that Obama was back in 2006. Sheesh.
The only way you can argue for this being a “clear double standard” is by twisting the facts into pretzels trying to disguise an extremely salient difference in the actual situations of the two authors in question at the time their books came out. The deeper you keep digging on this effort, the sillier you make your argument look.
Conservatism cannot fail. It can only be brutally betrayed and stabbed in the back by outside forces devoted to the rapid subversion of the United States to a godless communistic society.
And it follows that anything that does fail is not true conservatism anyway.
Is it “appropriate” for news organizations to fact check books? :mad:
Is it APPROPRIATE?
What is the POINT of having a free press if not to call BULLSHIT on LIES?
Is this what conservatism in America has come to? This decadent postmodern attitude that there is no such thing as objective truth, only political expediency? Have we finally arrived at the point where the epistemology of French literary critics becomes the dominant mode of discourse for the American right? Can it actually be that raw disregard for objective truth is now something to be willfully overlooked lest it be thought offensive or inappropriate?
We wouldn’t want to hurt anyone’s feeling, right? We wouldn’t want to make anyone feel BAD about themselves by pointing out they’re spouting a load of CRAP. We wouldn’t want to make an entire political movement look like mouth-breathing morons for their uncritical acceptance of that load of crap.
Because that would be … inappropriate.
Jesus.
Palin should have welcomed fact checking. It was her opportunity to prove she is not a self serving bimbo. She could prove she was a serious politician and deserves some respect. She failed yet again. I suppose this is her political funeral dirge. Her epitaph:She quit as governor and took the money and ran".
Sarah Palin looks like a special case here, as plenty of both Democrats and Republican published books get skipped over by the AP when it comes to fact-checking. So what exactly is this “clear double standard” you’re talking about?
Perhaps “extremely famous people with a reputation for being liars get facked checked more than less famous people who don’t lie as much.”?
Life is so unfair.
Just to even the playing field, maybe a bunch more could be dedicated to fact checking AL Gore’s new effort, *Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis *
Oh, it will be fact-checked, of this you may be certain. Only slightly less certain it will be found to be full of lies, conspiracy, skulduggery, and socialism. George Soros and the Protocols of the Elders of ACORN will figure prominently. That these facts are not trumpeted in daily headlines will be pointed to as clear indicators of liberal bias.
And so it goes.
I hold no particular opinion on the existence or non-existence of a bias in the mainstream media. I consume so little of it that it’s hard to give a shit. On the other hand, you can’t seriously believe that a high-profile, vocal critic of the mainstream media is going to be treated with dispassionate aplomb by the same people she’s been slamming for the past year and a half. It’s kind of like the college sophomore who turns in a scathing review of ee cummings, ridiculing his arrogant departure from accepted standards of orthography, being surprised when the professor counts off for his own grammatical errors. If you’re going to throw rocks, don’t be surprised if you get a few of your own windows broken. This is simple human nature, not evidence of a larger bias or non-bias on unrelated issues.
Enjoy,
Steven
Oh look, a poisoned well! Anybody who disagrees with Shodan is a really partisan moron! Which means that his extremely convenient bullshit partisan martyr opinion must be correct. Any objective reporter would *clearly *report that she is a flawless goddess who is perfectly honest and right in every way.
No, that would get you labeled as sexist.
This is a new world. There is fact checking going on everywhere. The internets has changed that forever. Even conservatives, who apparently should be exempt, will have every thing they say and write ,thoroughly checked. We have enjoined big debates over everything Gore wrote. Nobody claimed he should not own up to everything he said. I an sure SHODAN jumped in . But Palin, thats different. She is too stupid and greedy to be fact checked. She is special. Gores defenders don’t say he should not be responsible for what he writes. Obamas defenders don’t say he should not be criticized. But, Palin is different. She is a repub and exempted from defending what she says. To question her is an act of political assassination.