ABC News' Steven Portnoy reports: In a conservative radio interview that aired in Washington, D.C. Friday morning, Republican vice presidential nominee Gov. Sarah Palin said she fears her First Amendment rights may be threatened by "attacks" from reporters who suggest she is engaging in a negative campaign against Barack Obama.
Palin told WMAL-AM that her criticism of Obama's associations, like those with 1960s radical Bill Ayers and the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, should not be considered negative attacks. Rather, for reporters or columnists to suggest that it is going negative may constitute an attack that threatens a candidate's free speech rights under the Constitution, Palin said.
"If [the media] convince enough voters that that is negative campaigning, for me to call Barack Obama out on his associations," Palin told host Chris Plante, "then I don't know what the future of our country would be in terms of First Amendment rights and our ability to ask questions without fear of attacks by the mainstream media."
The article is referring to this interview. Palin’s one-sentence quote is taken from a longer exchange that can be found at the beginning of “Chris Plante Interviews Sarah Palin Part 2”:
Host: And of course Rashid Khalidi is not the only radical that Barack Obama’s associated himself with over the years and you also have been kind of out there on the pointy end of the spear talking about William Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn to a lesser extent perhaps but William Ayers and once again the role of the news media in this campaign when it comes to Barack Obama’s relationships over the years with Rashid Khalidi and William Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn and Father Pfleger and all of these other people. Is, is the news media doing its job, are you getting a fair shake, the Republicans getting a fair shake this year?
Palin: I don’t that that they’re doing their job when they suggest that calling a candidate out on their record, their plans for this country, and their associations is mean-spirited or negative campaigning. If they convince enough voters that that is negative campaigning for me to call Barack Obama out on his associations, then I don't know what the future of our country would be in terms of First Amendment rights and our ability to ask questions without fear of attacks by the mainstream media. Look at Joe the Plumber, good old Joe the Plumber in Toledo, Ohio. He just asked a simple, straightforward question and the media started investigating and attacking him. So there is some fear there and in those terms, no, I don’t think that they’ve been doing their job in that kind of context.
Is Political Radar’s description of what Palin said accurate? Certainly the first sentence in the second paragraph is way off base:
Palin told WMAL-AM that her criticism of Obama's associations, like those with 1960s radical Bill Ayers and the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, should not be considered negative attacks.
Palin most certainly did not say “that her criticism of Obama's associations ... should not be considered negative attacks.” (Is there such a thing as a positive attack?) What she said was that it is not the media’s job to declare her criticisms of Obama “mean-spirited or negative campaigning”. In other words, the media does not get to decide what is and is not a valid criticism of her political opponent. (I believe that would be the job of the voters.)
There is nothing new about what Palin is saying in this regard: many who oppose Obama have expressed frustration that much of the media seems to consider virtually any criticism of Obama an irrelevant distraction at best and downright racist at worst. Palin is simply arguing that Obama has succeeded in getting the media to enthusiastically support his rules for the general election:
[Obama] can’t be called a “liberal” (“the same names and labels they pin on everyone,” as Obama puts it); his toughness on the war on terror can’t be questioned (“attempts to play on our fears”); his extreme positions on social issues can’t be exposed (“the same efforts to distract us from the issues that affect our lives” and “turn us against each other”); and his Chicago background too is off-limits (“pouncing on every gaffe and association and fake controversy”).
After eliminating that sentence, what remains of Political Radar’s description is:
Gov. Sarah Palin said she fears her First Amendment rights may be threatened by "attacks" from reporters who suggest she is engaging in a negative campaign against Barack Obama. [snip] for reporters or columnists to suggest that it is going negative may constitute an attack that threatens a candidate's free speech rights under the Constitution, Palin said.
The article has elected to confound two different points Palin made: her concerns about the First Amendment and her concerns about “our” being able to ask questions without fear of “attacks” by the media. Let’s separate these out.
The First Amendment concerns are the hook on which most of the commentary criticizing Palin for this interview has hung its hat. You can take a look at HuffPo (channeling Jeff Greenwald); ThinkProgress (which apparently feels no commentary is necessary - other than that picture - but does get full credit for providing audio - although not text - of the whole exchange); Daily Kos (channeling Alex Koppelman); Keith Olbermann (nope, not linking); The Young Turks; and a slew of other sources. The thrust of this commentary is that Palin is so stupid she thinks the First Amendment does (or should) protect her from the press when in fact the First Amendment protects both free speech by individuals and a free press from interference by the government. The Young Turks video provides the best summary:
She’s saying that the media is challenging her First Amendment rights when they say that she is lying or running a negative campaign. But the whole point of the First Amendment is freedom of the press. I mean, it’s in there. Freedom of the press and freedom of speech. Both things are in there. And second of all, it doesn’t negate your freedom of speech if someone else speaks. Third of all, you’re a politician. The whole point of the First Amendment was to keep our politicians in check.
(I’m not going to rant and rave about The Young Turks’ decisions to translate “mean-spirited” as “lying”. The whole discussion of what constitutes lying in a political campaign is a huge one that I suspect will become extremely germane if we end up with an Obama administration.)
Is Palin saying “that the media is challenging her First Amendment rights when they say that she is lying or running a negative campaign”? Maybe. It’s certainly one interpretation of what she said. However, I think that interpretation is most likely to occur to people who are already convinced Palin is stupid and doesn’t understand the Constitution. The very people, for example, who are (wrongly) convinced Biden wiped the floor with Palin when they discussed the Constitution during the Vice-Presidential debate.
There’s an alternative explanation that I find more likely. Oddly enough, I believe Governor Palin was agreeing with The Young Turks: “The whole point of the First Amendment was to keep our politicians in check.” You see, Barack Obama is a politician also. If the majority of the media goes along with his campaign’s desire to define his opponent’s criticisms of him as invalid then what keeps him in check? In Palin’s formulation, the press has not only refused to criticize Obama themselves, they have also delegitimized her attempts to do so. Palin is arguing - admittedly very sloppily - that when so much of the press is so supportive of one politician over another then the press is not doing the job envisioned for it by those who wrote the First Amendment.
Is she advocating somehow making the press do her bidding? I really can’t see that. So far as I know, Palin has not suggested anything like banning further interviews with a Florida station for raising unpleasant issues; ejecting non-endorsing papers from her campaign plane; or mobilizing supporters to flood WGN with phone calls for inviting a guest critical of McCain. In fact, despite her claims of mainstream media bias she hasn’t even proposed enacting a new Fairness Doctrine.
Rather Palin is using the power of the bully pulpit. She is stating that the press is not doing its job and expressing her concern about what the consequences will be if the voters do not realize that.
What about Palin’s second point, her concerns about asking questions without fear of the “attacks” by the media? Here Palin is talking about the chilling effect non-governmental actions - specifically media attacks - can have on ordinary people questioning politicians. Again I don’t think she’s advocating muzzling the press but is stating her belief that the press’ job does not include attacking citizens who challenge Obama.
The criticisms of Palin’s remarks have both sprung from and reinforced previously held beliefs about her: she is too stupid to understand the Constitution and committed to the “standard” Republican agenda of leashing the free press. Those beliefs have made it easy for the media - and those they inform - to focus on her reference to the First Amendment and ignore the full meaning of her remarks: the media are attempting to delegitimize not only her criticism of Obama but also any negative remarks leveled at Obama from any source. And should the full meaning of her remarks slip through, well, the “fact” that she is both stupid and thuggish renders her points invalid. After all, how could someone like her possibly have anything legitimate to say about anything?
I sincerely hope I’m alive twenty years from now when objective observers are able to take a long, hard look at the Sarah Palin phenomenon. The political analysis will be fascinating, of course, but even more interesting will be the sociological analysis of the class-based nature of Palin’s treatment by the media and the psychological analysis of how people so clearly saw exactly what they expected to see when they looked at Palin.
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