In a few days Sarah Palin’s much-anticipated Going Rogue hits the stores. But this morning Ms. Palin is already meeting some criticism for allegedly false statements. Before the book is even released, a gaggle of Associated Press—yes, Associated Press!—writers took it upon themselves to embark on a fact-checking mission:
FACT CHECK: Palin's book goes rogue on some facts
By CALVIN WOODWARD, Associated Press WriterWASHINGTON – Sarah Palin's new book reprises familiar claims from the 2008 presidential campaign that haven't become any truer over time.
Ignoring substantial parts of her record if not the facts, she depicts herself as a frugal traveler on the taxpayer's dime, a reformer without ties to powerful interests and a politician roguishly indifferent to high ambition.
Palin goes adrift, at times, on more contemporary issues, too. She criticizes President Barack Obama for pushing through a bailout package that actually was achieved by his Republican predecessor George W. Bush — a package she seemed to support at the time.
In Palin’s 400+ page memoir Calvin Woodward and his team of assistants found only a handful of questionable statements. This would hardly be a news story were the author of the book not the leftocracy’s the most hated and feared woman.
Now, in theory I have no problem with a news outlet parsing a popular new book and addressing misstatements, exaggerations, and falsehoods. If an author is gilting the lily, they should be called on it.
What I do have a problem with is the apparent enthusiasm with which a news source went after this book. You’d be hard pressed to find the mainstream media so ambitiously fact-check the publication of a liberal/Democrat public figure.
In 2003, Hillary Clinton’s Living History memoir came out. Taxpayer-funded NPR granted her no less than four interviews. In one of them, NPR did not fail to note that Hillary “criticizes the Bush administration for a ‘power grab on so many fronts’ which she calls an attempt to implement a ‘very radical, right-wing agenda.’” (This would be the same NPR which seems not to have a problem with the Obama administration grabbing power on so many friends in order to implement a very radical, left-wing agenda.)
Interestingly, one of the most critical reviews of Hillary’s book came from Maureen Dowd at the NY Times. But Dowd’s complaints were not with any questionable statements, but merely with her writing style and content. No matter. Hillary was vindicated in 2004 when Clyde Haberman skewered Dick Morris in the Times’ review of Rewriting History. The Washington Post was also not very kind with Morris’ 300+ page retort to Hillary’s fantasy memoir.
You have to go across the pond to London’s Independent to find an article questioning the veracity of Living History.
It was actually Bill Clinton’s My Life memoir from June, 2004, that got more criticism by the press, e.g., USA Today. But that didn’t stop the media from ooh-ing and aah-ing over the sales records Clinton was breaking, and it certainly didn’t stop Clinton from being applauded on all the news shows, from Oprah to 60 Minutes.
The headline on CBS News’ Politics page on June 14, 2004 blared “The Return Of The Comeback Kid” and declared: “Bill Clinton is back.” Instead of critiquing the nearly 1000-page tome, the Chief Political Writer David Paul Kuhn wondered how much Clinton’s book was going to hurt George W. Bush in the 2004 presidential election.
Again, when Dick Morris and Eileen McGann hit back in December, 2004, with Because He Could, the mainstream media circled the wagons. Chris Suellentrop in the Washington Post mocked the 270-page attempt to set the record straight as an “extended blog entry with a dust jacket.”
And what of the pièce de resistance, the opus d’opus, the king of all books which are loads of B.S. from front cover to back cover: An Inconvenient Truth by Albert Gore, Jr. Five years after the release of this deceptive piece of propaganda and its accompanying movie, the mainstream media is still enamored with Al Gore and his cause.
But the inconvenient truth is there are more lies in one chapter of An Inconvenient Truth than in Sarah Palin’s whole book. This is handily demonstrated, for instance, by Marlo Lewis, Jr. at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, whose monograph A Skeptic’s Guide to AIT meticulously deconstruct’s Gore’s book page by fallacious page.
If the Associated Press or any mainstream news outlet were anywhere near as ambitious at fact-checking An Inconvenient Truth as they are Going Rogue, Al Gore would be a humiliated has-been and the campaign to fight man-made global warming climate change would be at the top of every list of humanity’s greatest scams.
Get ready for some more Gore-lovin' from the mainstream media; the thinking man's thinking man has a new man-made global warming climate change book out this month. You think Calvin Woodward and the gang at the Associated Press are going to be fact-checking this or any of Gore's books? Sure, and pigs will be flying out of my skinny white butt.
Like I said, in theory I have no problem with—and even welcome—the media conducting a principled analysis on a public figure’s memoir.
But the selective fact-checking crusades are just a little too transparent.
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