The press corps has a mild buzz going about a weekend
contretemps ginned up, for publicity’s sake, by Sarah
Palin’s camp, in her ongoing campaign to show how badly she is
victimized by the media. The odd thing is that she has
been victimized by the media, horribly so, and many of us (myself
included, in several posts after the Gabby Giffords shooting) have
rushed to her defense — so she doesn’t need to gin up
controversies out of thin air. But that’s exactly what she and her
team did this past weekend.
What happened was that Alex Pappas of The Daily Caller,
one of the rising stars among political scribes and a meticulously
careful and wonderfully polite, fair-minded young man (an aside:
I’ve known him since he was in junior high school), wrote a
perfectly fine story about Palin’s current stances vis-a-vis
the presidential race. In it, one of the things she said was that
if Mitt Romney is the nominee, well, of course she would endorse
him over Barack Obama.
Fox Nation picked up the story and, in its own headline (not
Pappas’, not the Daily Caller’s, but its own headline
completely apart from anything Pappas ever wrote) played up the
“Romney endorse” angle in a way that apparently did not make it
clear that the endorsement might be in the general election, rather
than the primary campaign. (The headline is no longer available at
Fox Nation, so I can’t say exactly what the wording was.)
Anyway, the Palin team pounced. Specifically inviting over
reporter Kasie Hunt from Politico so she could hear the
exchange, Palin called Pappas’ cell phone and began berating
him in a very scolding manner for writing a headline suggesting
she supports Romney. Pappas didn’t even know what she was talking
about. When he tried to say that neither he nor his editors had
written such a headline, she said she didn’t have time for this,
that she needed to go back to the “real people” at the State Fair,
and hung up on him.
Later, when it became clear that Fox Nation, not Pappas or
The Daily Caller, had written the semi-offending headline,
a Palin press aide called Pappas back not to apologize but to say
that they now realized it was Fox and that the headline had been
taken down. “No,” Pappas said, far more bemused than angry or
upset, “he didn’t come close to apologizing.”
Added Pappas, again lightly rather than angrily: “It was
definitely ironic when she was the one complaining about a reporter
being sloppy when she was the one being sloppy by complaining to
the wrong reporter.”
Look, it’s one thing for Palin to complain about unfair press.
She has a right to do so. It’s also understandable that somebody
might, at first glance, mis-read an online piece in a way that
makes the original source unclear. But, really, somebody with so
much experience in the public eye should know A) that reporters
often don’t write their own headlines; B) that there is a
difference between an original news story, on one hand, and a
partial reprint of a story on a news aggregator such as Fox Nation;
C) that if the text of a story doesn’t match the headline, it is
only the text, not the headline, that is the reporter’s doing; and
D) that such a small mis-impression isn’t worth getting hot under
the collar about. I mean, really, talk about a thin skin! This was
absurd.
What was even more absurd is that she and her team deliberately
played it up by inviting one reporter over just to hear her berate
another reporter. That’s unprofessional on its face, and it’s also
really odd in that the reporter they called over works for a
publication often accused of leaning left, while the (innocent)
reporter being berated works for a publication accused of leaning
right — and one whose whole story, in the first place, was
entirely accurate and showed absolutely no animus against Palin or
even anything that would put Palin in a bad light.
If Palin wants to get rid of the image of being a difficult diva
with a rude streak, she needs to stop acting like a difficult diva
with a rude streak.
