Ben Smith, a liberal reporter for the lefty blog “news” site Politico, has written a blog post criticizing the coverage Sarah Palin got in a recent Vanity Fair hit piece. Before you go giving kudos to a lefty journalist for coming to Mama Grizzly’s defense, read the whole thing.
You see, it’s really Palin’s fault that this kind of thing happens. Because she has decided not to talk to the very reporters who, the Journolist exposés proved, conspired to destroy her, she gets the kind of shoddy treatment dished out by the likes of Vanity Fair:
Palin almost never talks to neutral media outlets, leaving her — as critics accurately note — subject to none of the questions, challenges, and reality checks that the political press puts regularly to almost every other national political figure. She takes a lot of heat for this, deservedly.
But with the hunger for information about her, and the traffic she drives, the press sometimes compensates by printing thinly-sourced, badly-reported nonsense about her that it’s hard to imagine making it into a serious magazine like Vanity Fair if it concerned any other figure.
Then he adds (naively or disingenuously, you decide):
Of course, this might not happen if she spoke to reporters — but that’s no excuse.
Does Smith really believe that if Palin subjected herself to the annoyance of people who have written that they hate her, that she’d get a fair shake? Only in the bizarro world of the mainstream media could someone believe this. The media have shown that it simply cannot and will not give Palin a fair shake. The stakes (Obama and the left lose anything that she wins) are just too high for them.
