RATS AND REPORTERS

One of our favorite themes is the paucity of journalism integrity in the US today. Perhaps it is our age which allows us to remember Murrow, Brinkley, and Cronkite. Perhaps it is an archaic college class in journalism ethics. Perhaps it is just an old fashioned sense of decency. Whatever the antecedents, we are horrified and saddened by the media’s reporting of the sleazy stories coming out of the McCain campaign corpse.

Chief among these reports was Carl Cameron’s piece on Fox News’ O’Reilly Factor yesterday evening. Citing anonymous sources, Cameron reported that the McCain organization was doomed by Sarah Palin’s inadequacy as a running mate. Without the hygiene of rubber gloves or disinfectant, he offered up stories of a Palin who did not know Africa was a continent, that the North America Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was an agreement between the North American countries of the US, Canada, and Mexico, or the most rudimentary facts about US government. He even threw in the salacious tidbit of Palin greeting McCain staffers fresh out of the shower, wearing only a bathrobe.



Now we have a problem with this report on a couple of levels.

• The only defense for slander is the truth. Absent named sources, this report cannot rise above the primordial slime of vicious rumor.
• It is incredulous that a sitting US governor could not name the countries in North America, identify the three branches of the federal government, or know the diffefrence between a continent and a country.
• The bathrobe item makes us cringe at the inappropriate intimacy.

The real story here is the rodent-like behavior of the McCain staffers. In a frenzy to save careers from drowning in a boiling sea of ineptitude, they are clammering over the body of the one person that gave the McCain campaign a shot at the Presidency. Palin’s nomination was the only point in the campaign that the media lights were turned away from Barack Obama and focused on McCain. Had McCain selected any other running mate, he would have lost by three times the margin. Post election finger pointing is inevitable, but the press’ role is analysis, not gossip. Now, we need a shower.