The American Spectator

Two regular contributors to Fox News took turns mocking Sarah Palin behind the scenes of Sunday’s “Fox News Watch” program, a video released by the network shows.

The video recorded during a commercial break on the program hosted by Jon Scott shows former New York Times reporter Judith Miller and former Washington Times reporter Liz Trotta laughing about negative reviews of Palin’s new TLC documentary series, Sarah Palin’s Alaska.

On the video, Miller, Trotter, Scott, Newsday columnist Ellis Henican and Fox News contributor James Pinkerton are seen preparing to go on the air when Miller says, “Oh, I do have something to say about Palin. I even prepared it. Who’s doing Palin?”

“I am,” Henican says.

“I’ll add,” Miller says.

Trotta then volunteers: “Alessandra Stanley [of the New York Times] had the best line [in her Nov. 11 review]. She said the new [Palin TLC] show was like ‘The Sound of Music’ without the Nazis, without the romance and without the music.”

This provoked laughter from Miller, who said, “Oh, the Washington Post hated it, too” and proceeded to laughingly paraphrase Hank Steuver’s Nov. 10 review, “He said [Palin has] the kind of sound of a voice when warning you to heed the bears - it would actually scare the bears… . He said you just get the sense that all she’s waiting for when she’s looking at this great outdoors is to get back to her SUV for enough bars to send out her latest twitter about the beauty of the environment.”

Video of the Miller-Trotta exchange was uploaded to YouTube by the anti-Palin blog PalinGates, which noted that heavy traffic to the Fox site had caused that video to “overload.” The blogger predicted that Palin “will be mightily [angry] if she sees this clip.”

Palin, the former Alaska governor and 2008 Republican vice-presidential candidate, is also a regular contributor to Fox News. Palin’s TLC show broke viewership records for a series debut that network, with 5 million tuning in for Sunday’s premiere episode.