Thursday, June 3, 2010

CBS story focuses on Sarah Palin's online community of supporters

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When Scott Conroy, who covers the digital realm for CBS News, contacted us in April to interview us for a story he was working on about Sarah Palin's supporters on the Web, we were more than a little bit hesitant. We know CBS' history of bashing conservatives in general and Gov. Palin in particular, and we asked Scott whether he intended to treat his subject matter fairly. After assuring us that he had no axes to grind, we answered his questions over the telephone for some 20 minutes or so.

Now that his story has been published on the CBS politics page we have to admit that Scott was as good as his word. The thrust of his article is that a passionate and loyal community of Gov. Palin's online supporters has become a potent force and could become an important grassroots component of her 2012 campaign organization, should she decide to run for the White House. Not that we don't have a few nits to pick with the final product of Scott's labors, however.

We don't like the term "Palin-Heads." It's a bit of a sore spot for us. We didn't much care for the "Fredhead" label, either, back when we were supporting Fred Thompson in the 2008 GOP presidential preliminaries. Our personal preference was "Frederalist" -- a pun to be sure, but it beat the heck out of the alternatives. Scott took "Palin-Heads" from our colleague Nicole Coulter's comparison of members of the Palin blogging community to the "Deadheads" who were fans of the Grateful Dead more years ago than we care to remember, as we enjoyed the Dead's music when they were at their best. Unfortunately, the band was not always at its best, and the music was at times awful. "Wake of the Flood" is our all-time fave Dead album, but we digress... Not all Sarah Palin's supporters are cultists, but the writer seized on Nicole's comments to portray us as such, which we believe undermines the seriousness of our support for Gov. Palin and the extensive research many of us conducted into all facets of the governor before we made the decision to support her.

We're sure that most of what Nicole had to say to Scott went unused in the final edited version of his story, and we're not criticizing her. She merely made an innocent comment, but Scott picked up on it to create what may not actually be an accurate impression. Only one quote from the entire 20-minutes of our own conversation with him survived the editing process, and this has generally been our experience when being interviewed by reporters. Standing alone and as out of context as a fish out of water, the quotes as published rarely convey their original meaning. This was certainly the case with what we said to Scott. Our point to Scott was that we didn't make Gov. Palin an object of worship, as many of the Obama cultists did with "The One," but rather we appreciated her all the more for being a down-to-earth real person who many ordinary Americans can relate to. We told him that she's a woman, not a goddess or diva, but she is nevertheless an exceptional woman. Our point was unfortunately lost in a CBS word processor. We were on the other side of the process for some 20 years when we worked in radio station newsrooms, however, so we understand how stories get cut for length, and it's often not done by the reporter, but rather by his or her managing editor. Sadly, editing for length often deprives a piece of meaning and continuity. By that time, a news story or feature is often out of the hands of the writer, however. It's something akin to a horse being designed by a committee and turning out to be a jackass. Or like any government project, but again we digress...

Besides Nicole Coulter and yours truly, Scott also talked to Adrienne Ross (whom we were only too happy to steer him to), O.P. Ditch, Sapwolf and Hillbuzz guy Kevin DuJan. Overall, it's a good and mostly positive piece (read it here) -- much better than we expected from CBS -- and for that, we can all be thankful. We should all get together, however, and come up with a descriptive term for the Paliniste which will be a better fit and not wince-inducing, as is "Palin-Heads."

Update: Scott talks to liberal CBS talking head Bob Schieffer here.

- JP

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