In the 1970s, The Boys on the Bus exposed how a clubby pack of male political reporters ruled the road to the White House and shaped the news. Four decades later, an outsider gal from Alaska has commandeered the 2012 media bus — and left Beltway journalism insiders eating her dust. We’ve come a long way, baby.
Amid frenzied speculation over her potential presidential-campaign plans, former GOP Alaska governor Sarah Palin launched an all-American road trip with her family this Memorial Day weekend. Establishment media types didn’t get reserved seats or advance notice of her itinerary. Palin rubbed the Washington media mob’s institutional sense of entitlement right back in its face. “I don’t think I owe anything to the mainstream media. I want them to have to do a little bit of work on a tour like this,” she jabbed.
Robbed of the reflexive genuflection customarily paid by publicity-seeking candidates to the political press, scribes, cameramen, and producers on the campaign trail began howling louder than the Rolling Thunder Harleys that Palin rode along with on Sunday in Washington, D.C. One miffed CBS News producer, Ryan Corsaro, pouted that the O. J. Simpson–style media caravan giving chase to Palin had created hazardous working conditions for all the intrepid news correspondents.
“I just hope to God that one of these young producers with a camera whose bosses are making them follow Sarah Palin as a potential Republican candidate don’t get in a car crash, because this is dangerous,” Corsaro said. Puh-lease. As if traveling America’s highways to historic tourist spots were akin to driving in an armored tank on Baghdad’s road of death.
In Philadelphia, a pair of news helicopters braved treacherous conditions to monitor the enemy on the ground. Soon, editors tracking the story from their cubbies will be filing workers’ comp claims asserting exposure to secondhand exhaust fumes from Palin’s bus. And I’m counting the minutes until some cub reporter double-parks somewhere in hot pursuit of Team Sarah and demands that she pay his ticket. I mean, how dare Palin “make them follow” her!
As my friend and blogging colleague Doug Powers put it: “Reporters whining about Palin are like kids who can’t reach the cookie jar because she keeps moving it.”
For more than two years, Palin-bashing journalists (on the establishment left and the right) have mocked the conservative supernova while milking her for headlines, circulation, viewership, and Web traffic.
They lambaste her as trivial, while obsessing over her shoes, glasses, and hair — and turning one of her misspelled words on Twitter into Watergate.
They label her a grievance-monger for calling out media double standards and then kvetch, moan, and wallow in a pool of self-pity when she doesn’t spoon-feed them coveted political scoops.
They call her dumb and then run around in circles trying to figure out her “mystery” tour and blame her for “faking them out.”
If Journolists could cover Saddam & Qaddafi & Stalin they should be able to cover Palin – without any assistance from her team. And they should be able to do it without driving like Diana’s limo driver.
It’s a better world when the media is in an adversarial relationship with authority, not a cooperative one.
CNN’s Martin Bashir ranted (incorrectly, naturally) that Sarah’s bus illegally had a US flag on it!
See transcript and video here.
A partial quote:
SARAH PALIN HAS BEEN ACCUSED OF USING THE FLAG FOR ADVERTISING, BY A STUPID BASHIR.
WHO DOESN’T YET KNOW THAT SHE IS PART OF THE FLAG OF HER BELOVED AMERICA,
MARTIN BASHIR, YOU MUST EAT YOUR WORDS
he needs to go back to his own commie country and stop telling american citizens what we can do and cannot do!
go sarah, should you run for president, i will vote for you.
at this point, i don’t care who our gop candidate will be, i will vote for them. we need to get rid of obama and his ilk.
You mean those media people are being forced to drive their own vehicles and rub shoulders with the “unwashed masses” of dangerous 2nd-Amendment loving common people in the hustings? I wonder how much they would prefer being sent to the relative safety of the Gaza Strip, Pakistan, Afganistan or Iran?
Martin Bashir could put up his own American flag, but he’s probably already burned it.