I HAD THE PRIVILEGE of living most of my life in a small town,”
Sarah Palin told the Republican National Convention. “I was just
your average hockey mom.” To John McCain’s supporters, his
selection of Alaska’s young, reform-minded governor as his running
mate felt like a feminine remake of Mr. Smith Goes to
Washington. But the media were determined to depict her as
something out of Deliverance.
On August 31, two days after Palin joined the ticket, a hometown
critic, Anne Kilkenny, sent out what became a widely circulated
e-mail that claimed, among other things, that “while Sarah was
Mayor of Wasilla she tried to fire our highly respected City
Librarian because the Librarian refused to consider removing from
the library some books that Sarah wanted removed.”
Two days later, Time magazine repeated the tale,
attributing it to John Stein, the incumbent mayor Palin had
defeated in 1996:
Stein says that as mayor, Palin continued to inject religious
beliefs into her policy at times. “She asked the library how she
could go about banning books,” he says, because some voters thought
they had inappropriate language in them. “The librarian was
aghast.” That woman, Mary Ellen Baker, couldn’t be reached for
comment, but news reports from the time show that Palin had
threatened to fire Baker for not giving “full support” to the
mayor.
The same day, Jessamyn West, a Vermont librarian, posted the
Time story to her website, Librarian.net, and added that
“Mary Ellen Baker resigned from her library director job in 1999.”
A reader of West’s site named Andrew Aucoin then posted “the list
of books Palin tried to have banned”—90 of them in all. But another
Librarian. net reader traced the list to a website where it
appeared under the title “Books Banned at One Time or Another in
the United States.”
Not only was the list a fake, but when the Anchorage
Daily News investigated the story, it found no evidence
that Palin had ever sought to remove books from the library. Back
in 1996, Baker (then Mary Ellen Emmons) did tell the Wasilla paper,
the Mat-Su Valley Frontiersman, that Palin asked her, in
the Daily News’s words, “about possibly removing
objectionable books from the library if the need arose.” Emmons
“flatly refused to consider any kind of censorship.”
Kilkenny made an appearance in the Daily News story,
quoting Palin as asking Baker at a city council meeting, “What
would be your response if I asked you to remove some books from the
collection?” Emmons’s response was firm and negative, according to
Kilkenny, who acknowledged that Palin did not cite any specific
books for removal.
The chairman of the Alaska Library Association’s Intellectual
Freedom Committee told the Daily News that there was no
evidence in her files of any censorship at the Wasilla library. As
for the librarian’s resignation, it appeared to be unrelated to the
putative censorship:
Four days before the exchange at the City Council, Emmons got a
letter from Palin asking for her resignation. Similar letters went
to police chief Irl Stambaugh, public works director Jack Felton
and finance director Duane Dvorak.… Palin told the Daily News back
then the letters were just a test of loyalty as she took on the
mayor’s job, which she’d won from three-term mayor John Stein in a
hard-fought election. Stein had hired many of the department heads.
Both Emmons and Stambaugh had publicly supported him against Palin.
Emmons survived the loyalty test and a second one a few months
later. She resigned in August 1999, two months before Palin was
voted in for a second mayoral term.
The story had been so thoroughly debunked by September 11–12,
when Palin sat for a series of interviews with ABC News’s Charlie
Gibson, that Gibson lobbed a softball:
Gibson: There’s a lot on the Internet about a
conversation you did or did not have with a librarian about banning
books. Want to clear up what’s on the Internet?
Palin: I never banned a book, never desired to
ban a book.…It kind of cracked me up seeing the list of books that
I supposedly banned—one of them was Harry Potter! It
wasn’t even written or published then.
But Gibson repeated another falsehood, as the ABC transcript
shows:
Gibson: You said recently, in your old church,
“Our national leaders are sending U.S. soldiers on a task that is
from God.” Are we fighting a holy war?
Palin: You know, I don’t know if that was my
exact quote.
Gibson: Exact words.
Palin: But the reference there is a repeat of
Abraham Lincoln’s words when he said—first, he suggested never
presume to know what God’s will is, and I would never presume to
know God’s will or to speak God’s words. But what Abraham Lincoln
had said, and that’s a repeat in my comments, was let us not pray
that God is on our side in a war or any other time, but let us pray
that we are on God’s side.
This story appears to have originated with an Associated Press
dispatch of September 3, which began: “Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin told
ministry students at her former church that the United States sent
troops to fight in the Iraq war on a ‘task that is from God.’” Yet
the day before the AP’s report, the liberal-left Huffington Post
had posted a video of Palin’s actual words:
Pray for our military men and women who are striving to do what
is right. Also, for this country, that our leaders, our national
leaders, are sending them [soldiers] out on a task that is from
God. That’s what we have to make sure that we’re praying for, that
there is a plan and that that plan is God’s plan.
ABC apparently realized its mistake. When it aired the
interview, the network cut the lines in which Palin disputed the
quote and Gibson insisted it was her “exact words.” In their place
was a YouTube clip that made clear Palin was praying, not
asserting, that Iraq was a task from God.
An AP dispatch on the interview relied on the wire service’s own
inaccurate reporting of a week earlier in claiming that Palin had
“contradicted an assertion she made at her former church that ‘our
national leaders are sending U.S. soldiers on a task that is from
God.’ ” That claim disappeared from later versions of the AP
story.
Neither the AP nor ABC issued a correction. And although a
September 13 New York Times news story pointed out ABC’s
YouTube sleight-of-hand, a Times editorial the same day repeated
the false story:
Her answers about why she had told her church that President
Bush’s failed policy in Iraq was “God’s plan” did nothing to dispel
our concerns about her confusion between faith and policy. Her
claim that she was quoting a completely unrelated comment by
Lincoln was absurd.
When they weren’t portraying her as a religious nut, journalists
in and out of the mainstream were trying to paint Palin as a bad
mother. At its most respectable, this took the form of a September
2 New York Times story titled “A New Twist in the Debate
on Mothers”:
With five children, including an infant with Down syndrome and,
as the country learned Monday, a pregnant 17-year-old, Ms. Palin
has set off a fierce argument among women about whether there are
enough hours in the day for her to take on the vice presidency, and
whether she is right to try.
In his convention keynote speech the next day, Rudy Giuliani
asked indignantly: “How dare they question whether Sarah Palin has
enough time to spend with her children and be vice president? How
dare they do that? When do they ever ask a man that question?
When?” Indeed, neither the Times story nor most others in
the genre noted that when Joe Biden took his Senate seat in 1973,
he was the single father of two boys, two and three years old.
(Biden’s wife and their year-old daughter had died in a car
accident three weeks earlier.)
Palin had announced that her daughter Bristol was pregnant in
order to put an end to a bizarre rumor that Bristol was the real
mother of Trig Palin, the governor’s youngest son, who was born in
April 2008 and has Down syndrome. This crackpot story originated on
the Angry Left website DailyKos.com, and mainstream media mostly
kept mum about it.
But there was one notable exception: the Atlantic,
which published a series of screeds on its website demanding that
Palin provide proof of maternity.
Bristol’s pregnancy moved this theory from the realm of the
preposterous to the impossible. But the Atlantic wasn’t
finished with Trig Palin. Its writer repeatedly described Palin’s
decision to give birth to a child with Down syndrome as a act of
politics—a salvo in a “culture war” and an effort to prove her
“pro-life credentials”—rather than of maternal love. A writer for
the left-liberal Salon.com echoed the claim: “Her Down syndrome
baby and pregnant teenage daughter unequivocally prove… that her
most beloved child is the antiabortion platform that ensures her
own political ambitions with the conservative right.”
Newsweek’s website even published an article by a
professor at the University of Chicago, where Barack Obama once
taught, that said of Palin: “Her greatest hypocrisy is in her
pretense that she is a woman.” This does not speak well for the
state of sex education in Illinois.
THE MEDIA ATTACKS on Palin proved devastating for Obama’s
campaign. As I write, in mid-September, McCain is ahead in the
polls, after trailing Obama throughout the spring and summer. One
survey in early September found that 51 percent of Americans
thought reporters were “trying to hurt” Palin; only 35 percent
thought journalists were even trying to provide unbiased
coverage. Obama got angry; his campaign promised what a September
12 headline on the Washington Post website called an
“aggressive response to GOP attacks.”
Perhaps not coincidentally, “the media are getting mad” as well,
the Post’s Howard Kurtz reported on September 11:
The McCain camp has already accused the MSM of trying to
“destroy” the governor of Alaska. So any challenge to her record or
her veracity can now be cast as the product of an oh-so-unfair
press. Which, needless to say, doesn’t exactly please
reporters.
The New York Times reported on September 12 that
Obama’s campaign “seemed flummoxed in figuring out how to deal with
[Palin]. His aides said they were looking to the news media to
debunk the image of her as a blue-collar reformer.”
Instead, by waging war against Sarah Palin for being normal,
Obama’s supporters in the media succeeded in transforming
him into the candidate of those who oppose religion and
motherhood. By the time you read this, perhaps they’ll have gone
negative on apple pie.
James Taranto, a member of the Wall
Street Journal’s editorial board, writes the
Best of the Web Today column for OpinionJournal.com.
