Today is the street release date for Sarah Palin’s memoir, Going Rogue, An American Life. It is currently on track to become one of the best selling books of 2009.
Believe it or not, The Associated Press decided to “fact check” Palin’s book. The article was authored by AP stalwart Calvin Woodward, with the aid of ten other reporters. Out of over 400 pages of text, they found a whopping six items to dispute. PowerLine Blog’s John Hinderaker examined the AP’s “fact checking”:
The AP starts with this one:
PALIN: Says she made frugality a point when traveling on state business as Alaska governor, asking “only” for reasonably priced rooms and not “often” going for the “high-end, robe-and-slippers” hotels.
THE FACTS: Although she usually opted for less-pricey hotels while governor, Palin and daughter Bristol stayed five days and four nights at the $707.29-per-night Essex House luxury hotel (robes and slippers come standard) for a five-hour women’s leadership conference in New York in October 2007. With air fare, the cost to Alaska was well over $3,000.
This is frankly pathetic. Palin says she didn’t “often” stay at high-end hotels, and the AP counters by saying she did, once. Yes, that’s why she said “not often” rather than “never.” What is indisputable is that Palin sold the Governor’s private jet and flew commercial, thereby saving the taxpayers a large amount of money and qualifying her as a frugal traveler.
Hinderaker concludes,
It appears to be a tribute to the factual accuracy of Palin’s book that eleven hostile AP reporters can’t come up with anything better than this.
By the way, am I missing something here? Because I don’t seem to remember the AP assigning a “fact check” team to dissect Hillary Clinton’s Living History or Barack Obama’s Dreams From My Father, or for that matter, Scott McClellan’s What Happened.
And speaking of those layers upon layers of mainstream media fact checkers, this is snort-worthy:
On Friday’s edition of [MSNBC’s] Morning Meeting, host Dylan Ratigan featured fake photos of Sarah Palin during a mocking segment on why Americans are fascinated with the former vice presidential candidate. While listing the show’s top ten reasons, Ratigan showed a doctored photo of Palin’s head on the bikini-clad body of a woman holding a weapon.
… Earlier in the segment, Ratigan displayed an image of Palin in a short, black mini-skirt. This photo is also not real.
[UPDATE, November 16: On his Monday program, Ratigan apologized for using the fake photos: “I want to apologize to Gov. Palin and all our viewers.”]
Michelle Malkin calls it Female Conservative Derangement Syndrome. I think it’s a dangerous combination of laziness, condescension, and fear. If the media wants to understand why public confidence in their work is currently at the lowest level in decades, they should look no further than their cringe-inducing treatment of Sarah Palin.
