Ron Paul vs. The Lamestream Media

I've posted a number of articles here that reflect my lack of tolerance for accusations of media bias. Even setting aside the frequency with which the "Bias!" label is thrown at opinions, predictions, jokes, and other things clearly not intended to be objective, I tend to find the discussions surrounding media bias more redundant and distracting than constructive. Of course the media is biased—the liberal media has a liberal bias, and the conservative media has a conservative bias.^[1] The liberal media is larger and more pervasive, while the conservative media is louder and more knowingly partisan, so it seems like it roughly cancels out, and regardless they're both pretty terrible at doing the important things we (naively?) expect the media to do.

Even worse, a lot of complaints of media bias are actually cases of the Sarah Palin Paradox (I just now made up the name, but it's something I wrote about back in April), which goes like this: If you're capable, via the printed word or some form of electronic transmission, of making it widely known that you feel your voice is being suppressed by the media, then your voice is no longer being suppressed, for you have in fact used the media to amplify it. And if you're capable of making it widely known that you feel your message is being distorted, then your message is no longer being distorted, for you have used the media to clarify it.

I say all this primarily to establish some credibility. Now, when I spend the rest of this article doing exactly what I can't stand—griping about media bias—it should be that much more meaningful. Or hypocritical.

Anyway, last week I wrote about a question Ron Paul was asked in whichever of the last half dozen Republican debates was moderated by Chris Wallace: "Are you suggesting that heroin and prostitution are an exercise of liberty?" Paul's response—that things like that should be decided at the state level, and, by the way, maybe we should have more faith in our ability to not do things that are dangerous, regardless of legality—was reported on with all the nuance and subtlety of a Michael Bay-directed action sequence. For example, here's a quote from a Time article about Obama's re-election chances:

[F]ive of the Republican candidates for President gathered in South Carolina for their first official debate. It was a weird show, newsworthy only because Congressman Ron Paul came out in favor of legalizing heroin, cocaine and prostitution.

And an editorial by Dana Milbank of the Washington Post, which discussed the debate via the condescending premise that none of the "adults" attended, leaving the "juveniles" on their own:

At Thursday night’s debate in South Carolina, Libertarian Rep. Ron Paul explained why heroin and prostitution should be legal and why the Department of Homeland Security should be eliminated.

And a Mother Jones piece listing "Ron Paul's 15 Most Extreme Positions":

7. Let the Oldest Profession Be: Paul wants to legalize prostitution at the federal level.
8. Legalize All Drugs: Including cocaine and heroin.

As I pointed out last week, Paul didn't argue for legalization; he argued for leaving it up to the states, which is very different, but whatever. The knee-jerk reaction to the idea of legalizing heroin makes a little bit of sense to me, as far as knee-jerk reactions go (talk about setting the bar low), but the righteous indignation over prostitution couldn't be more absurd, because prostitution is legal at the federal level. Apparently it never occurred to these journalists to ask themselves (or, even better, a knowledgeable bystander) just what the hell is going on in Nevada.^[2]

So there's your media bias. A Republican presidential candidate—who, it should be noted, is doing alright in the polls—is widely ridiculed for, really, nothing. Especially in terms of the prostitution issue, where he merely offered an unemphatic defense of the legal status quo. And he wasn't even the one who brought it up.

Fortunately, there's a watchdog group out there combating anti-conservative bias with so much zealotry, they've been known to confuse bias with the mere asking of a difficult question.^[3] Here's what NewsBusters had to say about the media's treatment of Ron Paul after that debate:

[…chirp…chirp…]

That's right, nothing.^[4] And nothing from Media Matters either. Or Politifact. Or just about anyone else. The most prominent media outlet I can find that consistently sticks up for Paul's more socially libertarian views is Reason.com, which is one of my favorite sites, but it's not exactly a media juggernaut.

Remember the Sarah Palin Paradox from earlier? How her portrayal of herself as the victim of an antagonistic media is undermined by her success in cultivating that image? Ron Paul is the person she's pretending to be. He's the one who says things the "lamestream media" doesn't want you to hear. He's the one who has to take his message straight to the people, because the media can't be bothered to simply report the facts fairly and objectively. He's the one whose voice is being suppressed.^[5] And does he spend even half as much time complaining about how he's treated?

Really, I'm asking. Does he? If he does, I never hear about it.

1. That people can't seem to agree on even that much is an endless source of frustration. As is the closely-related inability to recognize that whatever your favorite source of commentary happens to be, it's still almost definitely biased in some way or another. In fact, that's probably why you like it.

2. This is as good a place as any to rant about Harry Reid's bizarre decision earlier this year to call on the legislators in his home state to ban prostitution:

Describing a meeting he had with a firm that would have opened a data center in the state—"a move that would have created desperately needed jobs"—Reid said the executives balked because prostitution remains legal in Nevada.

"Nevada needs to be known as the first place for innovation and investment—not as the last place where prostitution is still legal," he continued. "When the nation thinks about Nevada, it should think about the world's newest ideas and newest careers—not about its oldest profession."

So…the way to create jobs is to shut down an industry that employs thousands of people and exists (legally) only in Nevada, thereby enticing a handful of (possibly fictional) investors who want to do business in a place that's just like the other 49 states, except more desert-y. Whatever Reid's ulterior motive was (and I'm sure he had one, because there's no other reason to lazily advocate something with no chance of happening), I hope it backfired.

3. For example, there was this NewsBusters' article from January, which I had started to write about, but then the Tucson shooting happened and made it seem even more pointless than usual:

NBC's Meredith Vieira seemed baffled by the concept of taking a principled stand against Obamacare, as she repeatedly pressed Michele Bachmann, on Thursday's Today show, why Republicans would bother to vote to repeal the health care bill in the House if it wasn't going to get passed in the Senate or signed by the President? Vieira's very first question to the Republican Minnesota Congresswoman set the aggressive tone for the entire interview as she demanded: "Given the fact that the Democratic-led Senate will never go for that and the President has veto power, why make that the first big thing on your plate?"

So…House efforts to repeal healthcare reform were virtually guaranteed to have no tangible effect, which raises the obvious question of why House Republicans felt this was a worthwhile use of their time. It's not bias that Vieira asked Bachmann to defend the repeal effort. It would've been unprofessional not to ask. (Bachmann's defense of the repeal, in part: "Because it's not symbolic. It's real." She keeps using that word, "real". I do not think it means what she thinks it means.)

4. Granted, NewsBusters is supportive of Paul from time to time, like after the most recent debate:

On Tuesday, Chris Matthews wrongly accused Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul of saying during the previous evening's debate he would let a critically ill person die if the patient didn't have health insurance.
…
Exactly how does Matthews and others on his so-called "news" network continue to get away with such blatant misrepresentations?

So…it's not like they refuse to come to Paul's defense altogether. They just don't do it unless they agree with him. Have I mentioned before that the overall level of respectability of America's various media watchdog organizations is distressingly low? (Yes, I have.)

5. Wow, I tried to hold it together, but it's really hard to complain about the media without sounding like a crazy person. Let me try those last three sentences again: He's the one who says things that, while defensible, are out of the mainstream, and thus not conducive to the simplified reporting people have grown accostomed to. He's the one who has to rely less on traditional media and more on Internet-facilitated grassroots organizing, which, even in this increasingly digital age, probably puts him at something of a disadvantage. He's the one whose voice is being…well, not suppressed, really, but a little harder to find than it should be. Is that better?

Taking a Break From Having Standards

Everything I post to this blog comes with an implicit guarantee that I've made a sincere effort to base my thoughts, observations, and opinions on reality, rather than the other way around. I like to ridicule politicians and commentators when they say or do ridiculous things, but I want to be fair about it—a well-founded argument isn't worth much if the hundred that preceded it were entirely unfounded. Of course, the fact that so many politicians and commentators take the opposite approach is the reason I have anything to write about in the first place. The world they inhabit is a depressing wasteland of logical fallacies, non sequiturs, and ad hominen attacks, and the more we pay attention to it the dumber we get.

It also looks like a lot of fun.

It's not like I've never been tempted. For every idea that grows into a half-decent article, there's another that was promising at first—interesting, novel, maybe a little controversial—but ultimately had to be abandoned. Upon further investigation it becomes clear that what I thought was something is, in fact, nothing. To make it work I'd have to omit a key detail, take a quote out of context, blow something out of proportion, or simply make things up, and that's not the kind of blog I want this to be. But who says I need to have standards all the time? Would Sean Hannity let a fundamental flaw in his argument stop him from making it? Would Keith Olbermann? Hell no, they wouldn't.

In that spirit I present, in somewhat abbreviated form, three of those discarded articles. And not the dull, respectable versions either, because starting now, and for the rest of this post,^[1] I will make no effort whatsoever to be fair.

—————

Fox News Ignored the Republican Primary Debate
These three screenshots were taken at exactly the same time (give or take 30 seconds) on June 13, 2011, about 20 minutes after the beginning of the Republican debate:

Doesn't it seem like something's missing from that last one? And I'm not selectively cropping, by the way—there was no mention of the debate anywhere on the FoxNews.com main page. I also went to the "Politics" page, and there was hardly anything there either. Just a single video—kind of hidden away off to the side—in which a correspondent spends two and a half minutes previewing the debate and reporting some mathematically impossible poll results:

So why was Fox News ignoring the debate? I don't know, but my two-part guess is, first, they didn't want to promote a rival network (MSNBC, whose ratings coincidentally suck, apparently does not have that concern), and second, they were afraid the Republicans would embarrass themselves. The candidates were in hostile territory, after all—a debate hosted and televised by CNN. What if the questions didn't presuppose that Obama's economic and foreign policies are disastrous? What if they were forced to defend the non-sensical premise that every incremental increase in gay rights destroys America a little bit more? Or that building a wall on the border is a viable solution to anything?^[2]

—————

Sarah Palin Supports the Libyan Government
It makes perfect sense that I follow Sarah Palin on Twitter, because I find them both oddly fascinating for reasons I can't explain without using the phrases "oddly fascinating" and "reasons I can't explain".

In April, Palin posted a series of tweets criticizing Obama's policy in Libya:

Libya deteriorates, Obama vacillates. Campaigner-in-Chief needs to justify why we're there or we shouldn't be there. Need to send world the

message: we'll only intervene in anyone's business if we're dead serious:get in, hit hard, get out. Listen to McCain http://bit.ly/flJzCXUS

At least on this 1, wish POTUS would hear McCain MT "@weeklystandard: Decries Timid Approach in Libya: B York reports: http://bit.ly/flJzCX"

Yeah, yeah, I completely agree with her points about Libya, and I was about to not give it a second thought, but then I noticed the links to the article about McCain. (Only the second link works; she broke the first one by adding "US" to the end, presumably in a misguided act of patriotism.)

.LY looks like a country code domain, I thought to myself. But which country? Lyberia? Lychtynsteyn? Lynyrd Skyrgyzstan?

Oh, right, it's Libya. Talk about sending mixed messages. Bit.ly isn't a Libyan company, but their URL means they're indirectly doing business with the Libyan government, and that means every time Palin tweets a bit.ly URL she's putting a few more dirhams in Qaddafi's pockets.^[3]

—————

Michelle Malkin is an Anchor Baby
That's right. The person who wrote this:

Clearly, the custom of granting automatic citizenship at birth to children of tourists and temporary workers such as Hamdi, tourists, and to countless "anchor babies" delivered by illegal aliens on American soil, undermines the integrity of citizenship -- not to mention national security. Originally intended to ensure the citizenship rights of newly freed slaves and their families after the Civil War, the citizenship clause has evolved into a magnet for alien lawbreakers and a shield for terrorist infiltrators and enemy combatants.

If the courts refuse to close the birthright citizenship loopholes, Congress must. Citizenship is too precious to squander on accidental Americans in Name Only.

…was born in the United States to Filipino parents who may or may not have had time to unpack between the airport and the delivery room. Really.

She's not a hypocrite, though, because she's not necessarily excluding herself from her own insulting rhetoric. Our jus soli policy "undermines the integrity of citizenship—not to mention national security", Malkin says. And given her long history of absurd fear-mongering and fact- and logic-impaired anti-immigrant screeds, I'd argue that Malkin has indeed done her part to undermine the integrity of citizenship—not to mention national security.^[4]

1. Not including the footnotes.

2. I wasn't watching the debate when I took those screenshots, but I caught parts of it later, and, honestly, if Fox's position was that it wasn't newsworthy enough to make a big deal about, I can't argue. To borrow a phrase from Neal Boortz, the debate was little more than a joint news conference. Perhaps it wasn't entirely unnewsworthy—we learned, for example, that Rick Santorum prefers Jay Leno to Conan (of course he does), and that Michelle Bachmann can't decide between Elvis or Johnny Cash (the correct answer is Johnny Cash, the second-best answer is Elvis, the worst answer is "both")—but if the alternative to ignoring the debate is plastering it all over the main page like there was nothing else happening in the world, I vote for the former.
    And yeah, I'm sure Fox's coverage is a bit more expansive when they televise one of these debates, but they are a TV network, after all. And they hardly make it a secret that they want people to watch Fox News at all times—as you can see in the screenshot, any time you go to the FoxNews.com main page there are little boxes at the top indicating what's currently on the air, what's coming up next, and how you can watch whatever you just missed.
    As for the screwy poll results, there's a perfectly logical explanation for that one, too. I checked out the original data (the relevant stuff is on p.23), and here's what seems to have happened: 13% of respondents said they haven't decided who they'll support, and 21% said they support a candidate outside the Romney/Giuliani/Paul/Palin/Bachmann top five. Fox lumped these two groups together under the label of "Undecided", because all those Cain/Gingrich/Huntsman/Johnson/Pawlenty/Roemer/Santorum/Someone Else supporters are really just kidding themselves. Then, they added 21 and 13 and got 76, because they're incompetent.

3. I'm having trouble even pretending to get worked up about this one. The Bit.ly people say they aren't sure how much of their money has made its way to the Libyan government, but it's somewhere south of $75, which is the registration fee they paid to the non-profit corporation that runs these things.
    Maybe it still makes sense to take your URL-shortening business elsewhere as a matter of principle, but that slope is awfully slippery. We can all agree that Libya sucks, but what about, say, Colombia? What about Montenegro? I don't even know anything about Montenegro. And before too long you'll find yourself making a qualitative comparison of Grenada, Tokelau, and South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands, at which point it's probably time to acknowledge that whatever principled statement you're trying to make is almost certainly not worth the trouble.

4. Yes, Malkin was born to non-citizen parents who had just stepped off the plane, but there's no indication her parents were here illegally, or that they came to the U.S. specifically so their daughter would be a citizen.
    Oh, did I forget to mention above that Malkin's parents may have had permanent visas? Sorry about that. She's said before that her dad obtained a green card due to his medical training, and she was born right in the middle of the brief window in the late '60s and early '70s when the government made it substantially easier for foreign doctors to get visas. A high proportion of these doctors were from the Philippines and other Southeast Asian countries. Some came in on temporary work/study visas and later adjusted to permanent status, but most were issued green cards right off the bat.
    People who argue for doing away with birthright citizenship, including Malkin herself, are almost invariably talking about "illegals" and temporary visitors, not legal permanent residents (i.e. non-citizens with green cards)—they just don't always make the distinction with a whole lot of clarity. The premise that an "anchor baby" can help the parents obtain legal status, which is largely bullshit to begin with, isn't even relevant in the case of parents who are legal permanent residents already.

Exclusive: Sarah Palin Admits Mistake

Since I'm pretty much the last person to weigh in on this, I won't dwell on the details, but about a week ago Sarah Palin brought her I-Don't-Need-to-Declare-My-Candidacy-to-Get-Attention Tour to Boston.^[1] Asked a question about nothing in particular, she decided to talk about Paul Revere—and proceeded to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that she had in no way prepared to do so. It would've been quickly forgotten, except that a few days later she appeared on Fox News and insisted that (a) she totally knew what she was talking about all along, and (b) the real villain was that pesky reporter with his "shout-out, gotcha type of question". To her detractors—myself included—this is further support for the perception that she is utterly incapable of taking responsibility for her mistakes and shortcomings.

Remember Palin's baffling response to Katie Couric's question about what newspapers she reads? "All of them, any of them that have been in front of me," she said awkwardly, as if the real answer was either "none" or something somehow even more embarrassing. She was also asked what Supreme Court decisions, other than Roe v. Wade, she disagreed with, to which she responded with more of her trademark rambling without ever actually naming one. A few days later she appeared on Fox News and insisted that (a) she totally knew what she was talking about all along, and…you get the idea:

My response to her, I guess it was kind of flippant. But, I was sort of taken aback, like, the suggestion was, "You're way up there in a faraway place in Alaska, do you know that there are publications in the rest of the world that are read by many?" And I was taken aback by that because, I don't know, the suggestion just was a little bit of perhaps we're not in tune with the rest of the world.
…
I shouldn't have been so flippant and just sort of brushed aside that because that was an important question, and I should have answered it, and yes, I can cite a lot of cases that I absolutely disagree with the Supreme Court on.

Moments like these, among many, many others,^[2] make me wonder if, in her mind, she's even capable of screwing up. I mean, there's no denying she's garnered a ton of support by positioning herself as the victim of forces that, due to an ill-defined combination of dim-wittedness and anti-conservative bias, are intent on suppressing her views. For that narrative to make sense—which isn't to say it does, though a distressing number of people seem to be on board—the views in question have to be, you know, well-articulated and based in reality, because otherwise it's not so unreasonable to suppress them. And in the absence of actually having views that are well-articulated and based in reality, the least she can do is never concede that they aren't. Is there a chance, then, that Palin's pretense of infallibility is not fundamental to her personality, but is merely a (maddeningly effective) political strategy?

The recent release of thousands of emails generated during her time as governor of Alaska provides an interesting opportunity to look for an answer.^[3] I didn't go through all of them, of course, but I searched for key words ("wrong", "incorrect", "sorry", etc.) to narrow it down. And yet, everything I read—just like everything I've seen reported elsewhere—pointed to the conclusion that Palin's obstinance is not an act. That she's no more likely to admit a mistake in a private conversation with her closest advisors than she is in front of an audience of millions.

But then I found it:

From: Palin, Sarah
Sent: Wednesday, February 13, 2008 10:14 AM
To: Irwin; Tom E (DNR); Lopez; Thomas M (GOV)
Subject: Fw: King air

Sent this to the wrong "Tom"", sorry.

On February 13, 2008, Sarah Palin sent an email to someone named Tom Irwin, but she meant to send it to Tom Lopez. Not only did she take responsibility for this mistake, but she did not blame either her political enemies or the "lamestream media", nor did she come up with a convoluted "I meant to do that" explanation. So it is possible. You heard it here first.

1. According to a recent Gallup poll, 95% of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents are familiar with Sarah Palin—no other potential 2012 Republican candidate has a number higher than 85%, and most are below 60%—while the remaining 5% answered sarcastically and the poll worker failed to pick up on it.

2. This Media Matters article, for example, discusses multiple "falsehoods" in Palin's autobiography, many of which involve her attempts to address and clarify some of the dubious things she said or did during the campaign. (I've made it clear in the past that I don't trust Media Matters to be objective—in part because I'm not sure they even try to be objective—and I didn't take the time to double-check their work, but they probably got at least some of it right.)
    There was also the "refudiate" thing, in which Palin accidentally invented a word by combining two existing words with similar meanings. She defended this by comparing herself to Shakespeare, the celebrated playwright who on many occasions intentionally invented new words (or borrowed words from other languages) when he found the English lexicon inadequate. Of course, I'm pretty sure Palin sold more books last year, so maybe she's got a point.

3. There's something really unsavory, by the way, about the obvious glee with which these emails have been presented to the public, as if it's just assumed that there'll be some kind of career-ending revelation in there.

Sarah Palin vs. The Lamestream Media

Exciting news from America's favorite two-thirds-term governor:

I've given this a lot of thought, and I'd like to share my thoughts on the never-ending issue of media bias.

Finally!

Too often the first instinct is to ignore blatant media bias, crudeness, and outright lies, and just hope the media instigator will grow up and provide fairer coverage if you bite your tongue and not challenge the false reporting of an openly hostile press. But I've never bought into that. That's waving the white flag. I just can't do it because I have too much respect for the importance of a free press as a cornerstone of our democracy, and I have great respect for the men and women in uniform who sacrifice so much to defend that First Amendment right. Media, with freedom comes responsibility.

Sounds good so far. A nice message about the importance of standing your ground and speaking your mind and—wait, what was that about the First Amendment?^[1]

(Give me a minute…)

Yeah, I can't figure it out. In fact, the whole thing's kind of hard to figure out. She's trying to make two unrelated points at the same time—first, that Bill Maher is an ass (which is hard to argue with), and, second, that the news-oriented elements of the media are biased against conservatives, and I guess women too—and the overall result is a bit of a mess. Not that I'm complaining.

Friends, too often conservatives or Republicans in general come across as having the fighting instinct of sheep.

This is my favorite non-basketball-related line, because what? Which Republicans? These are the same people who used a bill to provide healthcare for 9/11 first responders as a bargaining chip, threatening to let it languish and die (so to speak) unless the Democrats gave them what they wanted.

Anyway, Sarah Palin will have you know that this negative stereotype she just made up most certainly does not apply to her.

I was raised to believe that you don't retreat when you're on solid ground; so even though it often seems like I'm armed with just a few stones and a sling against a media giant, I'll use those small resources to do what I can to set the record straight. The truth is always worth fighting for.

The "stones" she's referring to include Facebook (where she has almost 3 million fans), Twitter (where she has almost 500,000 followers (myself included)), two best-selling books (which have combined to sell over 3 million copies in less than two years), a reality show (which drew an average of 3.2 million viewers per episode), and what I assume is an open invitation to appear on any politically-oriented TV or radio show at any time. The "sling" would be Fox News, America's highest-rated news network, and her current employer.

Governor, I'm moderately familiar with King David. I've read about King David on Wikipedia. I like to think King David would've been a friend of mine. Governor, you're no King David.

The media has always been biased. Conservatives – and especially conservative women – have always been held to a different standard and attacked. This is nothing new. Lincoln was mocked and ridiculed. Reagan was called an amiable dunce, a dangerous warmonger, a rightwing fanatic, and the insult list goes on and on. (But somehow Reagan still managed to win two major electoral landslides…)

To the extent that Palin's missive makes any sense to begin with, this is the second-best illustration of why her reasoning is flawed. She claims conservatives are held to a different standard, then cites two (rather dubious,^[2] but that's beside the point) examples of the standard to which conservatives are held, thereby proving exactly nothing. How were their non-conservative opponents treated? (Answer: Similarly.) How did they overcome such overwhelming negative press? (Answer: It probably helped that they also had plenty of positive press.) How is whatever mockery Lincoln endured in any way relevant to contemporary treatment of conservatives? (Answer: It's not. At all.)

The thing is, if she tried hard enough, I'm sure she could make a plausible argument that the media treats conservatives unfairly. But she doesn't do that, I assume because any empirically-observed bias would be, at best, slight, and would therefore undermine her implications that anti-conservative bias is both self-evident and substantial.

Let's just acknowledge that commonsense conservatives must be stronger and work that much harder because of the obvious bias. And let's be encouraged with a sense of poetic justice by knowing that the "mainstream" media isn't mainstream anymore. That's why I call it "lamestream," and the LSM is becoming quite irrelevant, as it is no longer the sole gatekeeper of information.

And this is the best illustration of why her reasoning is flawed. "Let's just acknowledge that commonsense conservatives must be stronger and work that much harder because of the obvious bias," she says, because what are you, some sort of liberal, who lacks the "commonsense" to acknowledge things that are obvious? Naturally, the main propagator of that bias is the "lamestream" media, which, Palin helpfully explains, is so named because "mainstream" is now a misnomer, what with the LSM's increasing irrelevance.

But then, if the mainstream media is no longer mainstream, what is it? And how can an entity that's "becoming quite irrelevant" also be a formidable enemy of conservatives? I mean, honestly. You'd think someone demanding better treatment from the media would try to make her internal contradictions a little harder to find. At the very least, spread it out over multiple paragraphs.

Let's keep pivoting around media bias, and not get distracted with the vulgar personal shots. Even with limited time we can try to call out lies and set the record straight, but always keep the ball moving. No one ever won a game only playing defense.

I have nothing to add to this, except that "Let's keep pivoting around media bias" edges out the sheep thing from earlier for my Favorite Palin Quote of 2011 So Far. While we're at it, let's post up on public-sector unions, and run a pick-and-roll against tax hikes, and execute Phil Jackson's triangle offense to defeat fiscal irresponsibility.

Today, our country is faced with seemingly overwhelming challenges. We have an unsustainable and immoral $14 trillion debt problem which, combined with a self-inflicted energy crisis, could bring America to her knees. The President of the United States is manipulating an energy supply by refusing to develop our U.S. energy resources. Shouldn't that be the media's focus today?

She goes on to suggest a few more things for the media to focus on, like the deficit, unemployment, home foreclosures, the Federal Reserve's recent decision to engage in some quantitative easing, rising gas prices, and our latest messy foreign entanglement.

I'm generally as skeptical as anyone of the media's ability (or willingness) to cover the important stuff, but I'm even more skeptical of Sarah Palin's ability (or willingness) to realistically characterize the extent to which everyone's out to get her, so I conducted a highly unscientific study.^[3] I did some Google News searches, restricted to March 19 through March 24—after Maher's juvenile name-calling and before Palin posted her thoughts on Facebook—and got the following results:

Search Term	Hits
"United States" "national debt"	646
"United States" energy	32,200
"Barack Obama" energy	10,500
"United States" deficit	4,230
"United States" unemployment	5,330
"United States" foreclosures	1,080
"Federal Reserve" "quantitative easing"	1,040
gas price "per gallon"	5,360
"United States" Libya	27,900
"Barack Obama" Libya	26,600
"Sarah Palin" "Bill Maher"	16

HTML Tables

The table proves nothing, except that I've learned how to tinker with column width and text alignment within cells, but I think it does create a rebuttable presumption that the media is not neglecting the real issues to talk about Sarah Palin. The media can and does cover both, and then some, because the media is an expansive, nebulous entity. So expansive and nebulous, in fact, that it should probably be referred to instead as "The Media," with finger quotes and a half-ominous, half-sarcastic tone.

More importantly—and I've touched on this a few times already, but it can't be emphasized enough—Sarah Palin is part of the media. I have a pretty negative opinion of her as a politician, but I do agree that her views are sometimes mischaracterized. Why? Because when she feels her views have been mischaracterized, I hear about it through the media. And when she feels an issue is being neglected, she talks about it through the media. So excuse me if I don't have much sympathy for Sarah Palin here. My sympathies are with the person whose voice is being legitimately suppressed.

Who is that person? I have no idea. That's the point.

1. "First Amendment" is very high on my list of terms that create a rebuttable presumption that the speaker doesn't know what they're talking about. Also on the list: racism, socialism, political correctness, anchor baby, hipster, and rebuttable presumption.

2. I was negative-three years old when Reagan was first elected, and not quite one when he was re-elected, and even I know his opponents were hardly given a free pass by the media. Carter, of course, had spent four years making a mess of everything, and Mondale famously promised to raise taxes, which I'm sure wasn't mischaracterized or blown out of proportion at all.
    As for Lincoln, the only reason he was even mentioned is that he was a Republican 150 damn years ago, when the Republican Party stood for sweeping societal change and federal usurpation of states' rights.

3. Alas, data gleaned from a Google search is far from reliable, considering Google's secrecy regarding their methodology, and the fact that hit counts often behave in seemingly illogical ways (decreasing when the date range is broadened, increasing when the range is narrowed, changing when search terms are reordered, etc.).
    But I'm pretty sure it's still more scientific than Palin's methodology, which is to simply assume there's a perfect overlap between your political agenda and reality.