What is that awful terrifying woman up to now?

Courtesy of the Guardian UK

Ross Douthat at the NY Times evaluates the media’s coverage of Sarah Palin. If you’ve wondered, as I have, why a liberal blog like the Huffington Post obsessively mentions Palin in dozens of articles day in and day out – see Michael Brenner’s article posted today, Barack Obama -- Out of the Closet – Douthat’s piece is a must-read. Here’s a sample:

And this is what’s so problematic, to my mind, about much of the Palin coverage: The media often acts as though they’re covering her because her conservative fan base is so large (hence the endless talk about her 2012 prospects), when they’re really covering her because so many liberals are eager to hear about, read about and then freak about whatever that awful, terrifying woman is up to now. Here’s an illustrative passage from Marshall’s post:

With Sarah Palin and pretty much everyone else, we’re not trying to pump her up or pull her down or really do anything else with her. That’s a second order kind of thinking I don’t think is really ever proper for us to get involved in. (To give one funny and ironic example I’m pretty sure our Eric Kleefeld was the first person to pick out Palin’s use of the term “death panels” in a Facebook post back in during the Summer of Hate and much of the subsequent furor ricocheted off that original post.)

The parenthetical, it seems to me, somewhat undercuts the first two lines. The fact that TPM was the first to seize on the “death panels” provocation is neither “funny” nor “ironic.”  Instead, it’s typical of the Palin-press symbiosis. If you were a casual consumer of political news in 2009, you would assume that Palin’s famous “death panels” remark received outsize media attention only after it became a rallying cry for the right-wing masses. But in reality, it received outsized media attention in part because a liberal Web site seized on it and ran with it as an example of the scary awfulness of Sarah Palin. And that pattern keeps repeating itself. It’s why there’s more Palin coverage in publications like TPM, MSNBC and Vanity Fair (not to mention, of course, a certain Palin-obsessed Atlantic blogger) than in many conservative outlets: Not because they’re the only places willing to tell the truth about her, but because they’ve built an audience that believes the worst about her, and enjoys wallowing in the fear and loathing she inspires.

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