Old Media Talking Out of Both Sides (of Their Mouths) About Palin

As we all know, Governor Sarah Palin has over the last week come out swinging at the Old Media and some far left elements of the new one. With the release of the Palin interview segment by documentarian John Ziegler and the subsequent wheezing attack by Pat Dougherty of the Alaska Daily News, Palin has once again taken center stage in a media maelstrom.

The Anchorage Press has a nice, fair re-cap of this current imbroglio between the Palin hatin’ Old Media and the governor of Alaska. One part of this article, though, is a spot on question that the ravenous Old Media should be forced to answer. If they all hate Palin so much, if they are all so sure she is a has been and is through on the national political scene, why are they clamoring so to get interviews with her, why the constant reporting on her?

Bill McAllister, the governor’s communications director, had a good question for the leg tingling Chris Matthews and his ilk because one minute Matthews slams her and the next calls her offices to get an interview.

Introducing the clips, MSNBC’s Chris Matthews referred to “the vice presidential campaign that won’t end,” a characterization that McAllister says was hypocritical, as Matthews had recently called him asking for an interview.

“If it’s so objectionable, why do you want to interview her?” McAllister asks. “This is the double standard we get from a lot of people in the media. I could put her on any TV program you could imagine. She’s being treated as if she’s out there trying to garner all this publicity; we turn stuff down every day. We turn down dozens of things every day. We get invitations all the time for her to speak at various events, either of a partisan or conservative nature or whatever; she’s not doing that. She’s here. She put out a budget. She’s got a State of the State address she’s going to deliver in less than two weeks. It’s not that she’s commenting, it’s that it seems like the national media will just gobble up anything Palin.”

One wonders how the liberal Old Media establishment has the temerity to say they aren’t attacking her when one day they are calling her names and the next trying to get interviews with her. I’ve reported incident after incident, so many incidents that I have risked becoming all Palin all the time.

But this Anchorage Press report does raise a good point amidst the re-cap of the current Palin/Media spectacular. It seems sort of obvious that Governor Palin is not being well served by her staff, particularly communications director McAllister. And the Ziegler interview is a case in point.

Apparently, McAllister was under the impression that the Ziegler interview would not see public release until the February Conservative Political Action Conference (C-PAC) which will occur after Obama’s inaugural is over. McAllister seemed to think that the heat would be off Palin in the media by February. Yet, as soon as he had something cut and put together, Ziegler used segments of the interview to hype the very film that will appear in its entirety at C-PAC.

McAllister should have easily seen that one coming. Palin is still a hot news item and Ziegler would have been a fool not to use the Palin clip to keep his upcoming film in the news. A good PR and communications guy would not have been side-swiped like McAllister was on this.

Palin has to get a firm hold on her image but so far the people she has helping with that are failing miserably. This is not to say that it is all their fault, of course. It is clear, even to the Anchorage Press, that the Old Media is out to get Sarah Palin. Even they had to admit that Palin is “perhaps justifiably” making the charge that she is “under siege by the media.” For the media, that is quite an admission.

(Photo credit: thealaskastandard.com)