Scarborough: Media's Palin Fixation 'Creepy'

By Joe Scarborough/Politico ~ I have never hesitated to state a strong opinion when Sarah Palin was the topic of conversation.

From my POLITICO columns to my ramblings on “Morning Joe,” I’ve always been tough on the former Alaskan governor for her undisciplined approach to national politics.

But another powerful player on the national stage has also performed badly since Palin’s debut in 2008. And this past week, the national press corps once again continued its embarrassing behavior toward Palin with what seemed to be a rabid pursuit of her official email records.

A quick scan of presidential polls shows that Sarah Palin will not be elected president of the United States anytime soon. That reality makes the media’s treatment of the former GOP vice presidential candidate disproportionate to her sway over national events. And yet the media’s obsession with Palin reached absurd heights last week with the publication of those 13,000 emails from her time as governor.

Dozens of reporters were dispatched to Alaska to sift through Palin’s correspondence with her staffers, her husband and even her children. Journalists spent hours collecting, digitizing and compiling the emails into searchable online databases.

The results of this years-in-the-making investigation ended up being as dull as dishwater, but that didn’t stop papers like The New York Times from breathlessly reporting the following titillating “scoops”: • “Back in 2007, well before Ms. Palin was a national figure, an adviser suggested meeting an important person in Washington.” • “An email from the manager of the governor’s house to Ms. Palin in early 2008 makes clear that Ms. Palin had inquired about the possibility of installing a tanning bed in the house.” • “In the weeks leading up to her selection as Mr. McCain’s running mate, Ms. Palin seemed to be paying particular attention to mistakes she found in news media reports about her.”

Stop the presses!

A politician was told by an aide that she should meet “important people” and took note when newspapers wrote inaccurate stories? Wow.

The next thing we’ll learn is that Palin liked to get more votes in elections than her opponents.

I’m sorry, but at this point the media’s fixation with Palin is getting downright creepy.

And they have been strangely obsessive since she burst onto the national scene in 2008. When my co-host, Mika Brzezinski, and I arrived at the Republican National Convention that year, we were met by excited network chiefs and newspaper reporters who were chasing down a sleazy Internet rumor that Trig Palin was not Palin’s child. To a neutral observer, the story was an obvious hoax, but unfortunately for their audience, the mainstream media were not a neutral observer when it came to the GOP candidate.

Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0611/56834.html#ixzz1PF1KWpGS.

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