COMM 150: Do Palin's attacks on Couric, mainstream media undermine democratic institutions?

If you're looking for Wednesday's online class discussion, scroll down one more. It's in the post about "don't touch my junk" stories and junk journalism ... this post is about the same general subject, i.e. criticism of the media, but the questions are at the end of the next post. - pe

This just in. I won't ask you to comment on it, but it relates to our study of ethical standards and values in journalism. Ex-Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska has accused CBS News anchor Katie Couric ... not for the first time ... of biased reporting.

Palin's remarks, dishing on her interviews with Couric during the 2008 presidential campaign, came on the Sean Hannity show to be aired tonight. Clips of Hannity show and part of an original interview are embedded in an Entertainment Weekly EW.com story on Palin's appearance on the Hannity show.

Palin is hard to paraphrase accurately -- like so many of us, she often starts new sentences before the finishes the first one, and it's hard to figure out how they all fit together -- but she seems to be saying Couric doesn't live up to the basic standards of journalism.

"I want to help clean up the state that is so sorry today of journalism," she told Hannity, as quoted by EW.com. "And I have a communications degree. I stud[ied] journalism. Who, what, when, where, and why of reporting. I will speak to reporters who still understand that cornerstone of our democracy … And then we get to decide our own opinion based on the facts reported to us. So a journalist, a reporter who is so biased and will no doubt spin and gin up whatever I have to say to create controversy, I swear to you I will not waste my time with her. Or him."

If that's what Palin is saying, I believe she's quite simply wrong. Whatever her shortcomings as a network TV news anchor, Couric's ethical standards are entirely professional.

My impression during the 2008 interviews was that Couric was trying to ask questions that would draw Palin out. Much of Couric's background was as a "soft news" reporter, especially on the Today Show, and I felt like she was falling back on the same interview techniques any experienced feature reporter uses with interview subjects who are inexperienced, nervous and/or inarticulate. I've used some of them myself. In one of the later interviews (there were three or four), I thought she did let her irritation show when it was apparent that Palin was evading her questions. But as I watched in 2008, I was more struck by what I considered to be Couric's tact with a news source who was obviously having a hard time making herself understood.

Why does this matter now? It doesn't bother me when politicians attack the media. That goes with the territory. But when a politician poses as a media expert, as Palin did on the Hannity show -- "I studied journalism. Who, what, when, where and why ...," etc. -- I expect the politician to get it right, to tell the truth. Palin may think she's telling the truth, but what she's saying about Couric here -- and the "lamestream media" in general -- is her opinion and ought to be recognized as such.

All of this seems to be coming to a head lately with Palin's book tour and her carefully orchestrated hints about running for president in 2012. In an op-ed piece on Palin's hard-core political appeal over the weekend, Frank Rich of The New York Times asked, and answered, the question, "Could She Reach the Top in 2012? You Betcha." He said:

... What might bring down other politicians only seems to make her stronger: the malapropisms and gaffes, the cut-and-run half-term governorship, family scandals, shameless lying and rapacious self-merchandising. In an angry time when America’s experts and elites all seem to have failed, her amateurism and liabilities are badges of honor. She has turned fallibility into a formula for success.

What Palin does, and she does it very well, is to express the grievances of a lot of Americans against elites of any kind. Which isn't all bad, as far as I'm concerned. Elites and experts give me stomach cramps at the best of times. As a reporter, I wasted too much of my time writing them up as they pontificated at news conferences.

But I get nervous when the expression of grievances goes over a red line, and it begins to undermine society's institutions like government and the press. And I think Palin is getting pretty close to that red line with her repeated personal attacks on Katie Couric and others she sees as elites.