The American Thinker: Media's Self-Defeating Attacks on Sarah Palin
Tuesday, September 14, 2010
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The American left and its tame media desire -- with an intensity that normal individuals would find impossible to understand -- to treat Palin the way a pit bull would treat a rabbit: tear her to pieces and toss her aside broken. But each new encounter ends with the governor stronger, more powerful, and more popular than before. What we're seeing is the latest example of the left's habit of creating its own nightmares […]
The technique never varies. The left, most commonly by way of the media, targets a particular group or politician, evoking a mammoth, sinister, but unclear threat to the public good. The attacks begin with an air of reasonableness and good faith -- the Cronkite/Moyers method -- but soon mount in rabidity to the Olbermann/Schultz level. The goal is not simply to oppose or confront the individuals involved, but to destroy them. Within weeks, the left as a whole is involved not only through traditional media, but also through blogs, comment threads, and sites such as DU and Kos.
But in many cases, the issues and personalities involved resonate with the public. When this is true, the forces arrayed against the targets cause no serious damage, instead serving only to increase their visibility and popularity. It's as if the energy being expended is working in the victim's favor. Eventually the effort goes hyperbolic, ending in large-scale hysteria and eventual collapse. A wounded left staggers off, whining about how "dumb" and "ill-informed" Americans are […]
The legacy media views politics through exactly that lens: rid the world of Goldwater, of Nixon, and then we will all walk into paradise together. But it never works out that way. After Nixon comes Reagan, and Gingrich, and Palin, and Jindal, and Brewer, and Haley...so it's all fantasy. There are no climactic battles in politics any more than there are climactic battles in getting up and going to work in the morning.
Politics is not Armageddon. It is an aspect of life, one requiring daily effort. It comprises a guerilla war, won not by mammoth all-or-nothing collisions, but by continual low-key encounters on the level of the commonplace. This is something that a politician would understand, a media figure not at all.
The media's scorched-earth strategy is innately self-defeating. In attacking Trig Palin, the legacy media insulted every woman raising a disabled child. In making light of Bristol's woes as a single mother, they infuriated every family suffering through the same crisis [...]
On the other hand, much can be learned from a close study of Palin's response to such attacks. After a naïve slip confronting the adorable Katie Couric, Palin has established a record of manipulating the media unmatched since Reagan's heyday. A single tweet from Palin's phone sends tsunamis roaring across the international media sphere. Palin has developed into one of the most media-savvy figures on the current scene.
But that shouldn't be surprising. There's one singular fact that the media, with all its research, all its prying, has failed in root out: she has a journalism degree.
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