Social Network

Sarah Palin recently gave an interview to John Ziegler, a conservative documentary filmmaker who is doing a documentary called “Media Malpractice”. The interview was conducted in Sarah Palin’s  Wasilla home in Alaska. The interview centered around the media coverage of Palin during the 2008 presidential elections.

In the interview Sarah Palin was asked what she thought of the media’s obsession with her family. She replied that she found the media’s obsession with her family “quite absurd”. She said she was particularly frustrated by the suggestion that she wasn’t the mother of her son Trig. The question of whether or not she was Trig’s mother was raised when a blogger suggested Sarah’s daughter Bristol was really the mother of the boy. The media picked up the story and ran with it and, according to Sarah, up to this day people are still calling her office questioning who is her son Trig’s real mother.

“When did we start accepting as hard news sources bloggers–anonymous bloggers especially. It’s a sad state of affairs in the world of the media today–mainstream media especially, if they’re going to be relying on anonymous bloggers for their hard news information. Very scary…” Sarah Palin in her interview with John Ziegler

As for the media’s coverage of her and her family Sarah believes there was a double standard. She says that where she and her family were concerned reporters preferred to spread things that weren’t true than to bother to dig for the facts. She raises the question of whether or not the media’s treatment of her had to do with her being a woman, pointing out that the media respected Barack Obama’s wishes when he told them his wife and family were off-limits while showing no respect for her family’s privacy.

Asked how she felt about the infamous Katie Couric interview after it was concluded, whether she felt it had gone well or not she replied:

“No, I knew it didn’t go well…I knew it didn’t go well the first day, and then we gave her a couple of other segments after that; and my question to the campaign was, ‘after it didn’t go well the first day why were we gonna go back for more?’”

With regard to the segment where Couric tried to get her to name some of the newspapers and magazines that she regularly reads to keep up to speed about what’s going on in the world, she responded to a comment which Katie Couric made on the David Letterman Show by saying, “Because Katie, you’re not the center of everyone’s universe.” On the David Letterman Show Katie Couric had commented that she never understood why no one ever asked Sarah Palin in any post-election interviews why she [Palin] didn’t answer the question Katie asked her about what newspapers and magazines she read.

Some segments from the interview:

The gist of the interview was that Sarah Palin does not believe she was handled fairly by the media. She thinks her mistreatment had something to do with her being a woman. She also thinks the mainstream media is going down the drain and there’s no longer a way to distinguish between gossip and fact. Bloggers have become trusted sources of information and no one is interested in going the extra mile to seek the truth.