Anyone who doubts that mainstream US media has a deeply dysfunctional relationship with the current Republican party and its voters should consider what WaPo has deemed fit to put in its magazine section this week. It’s something called " Sarah Palin Has Long Been Ridiculed. I Wanted to Tell a Different Story: A reconsideration of the narrative that surrounds her as she runs for Congress" by T.A. Frank. (No link, for reasons that will become apparent.)
It starts out with Frank (who normally writes for The Atlantic and was, long ago, the author of “What’s the Matter with Kansas?”) as the intrepid reporter looking for a scoop. Palin is scheduled to appear at a candidate forum in a tiny remote town in Alaska accessible only by air. Frank resolves to make the “difficult and expensive” trip there to try to get an interview with Palin, who zealously avoids hard news media these days.
While there, he treats us to the usual cliches of small town political reporting. Gosh, broadband is hard to come by in rural areas! He had to share a taxi! And yes, he predictably scouts out the hotel restaurant for insights as to what the quaint locals think. (Of course, he’s there for a political forum, so they’re all politicians.) But Palin doesn’t show. When he tries to get in touch with her, neither she nor anyone in her inner circle will talk to him.
We’re then treated to several self-pitying paragraphs where he complains at length about how no one will talk to him, culminating in an eye-poppingly over-the-top metaphor where he compares himself to “a new prison warden who vows to set a kinder tone only to find himself stabbed in the leg with a shiv made from a paper plate.” (Because clearly refusing to talk to him is equivalent to an act of violence.)
So Frank fails in his attempts at conventional reporting, which is to say finding any new facts or interest and importance. But that doesn’t stop him. Because, as it turns out, he doesn’t actually want to do conventional reporting. No, his mission is something else altogether:
“I spent some time digging for the 573rd piece of dirt on Palin, because we all know it’s out there — but my heart wasn’t in it. In reporting terms, there is nothing new and bad left to say about her. Even if it turns out she’s been running, say, a Ponzi scheme involving caribou antlers, it’s all footnotes, something to be added to a long-standing negative narrative half the country will embrace or reject. I instead resolved to fight my own mental shortcuts — such as viewing her moneymaking pursuits as cynical — and come up with the most generous theories of Palin that I could, given the facts on hand. It’s something we ought to be doing more of these days, anyway, if we’re to feel our way back to getting along.”
Sure, there might be new facts to report about Palin. But, specifically because they would be bad things, Frank isn’t interested. His role - in his mind, everyone’s role - isn’t to critique or present new facts. Our proper role is, in Frank’s mind, to get on our knees, feel humility in our hearts, and bow down.
It isn’t that Frank actually approves of Palin, mind you. As he documents at length, she’s wildly unreliable, flaking out on things much more important than a small town debate (like being governor of Alaska.) She has “betrayed followers and supporters,” she spouts " evasive and incoherent policy positions," and “appalling statements.” She’s “prickly,” “hazy,” and her understanding of national and international affairs is “dangerously inadequate.” And yet, he is unshakable in his advocacy for cutting her every possible break, giving her the benefit of every possible doubt, from now until the end of time.
There’s a weird, delusional section where he tries to improve our image of Palin by explaining that, as bad as Palin is, she at least wasn’t as bad as Trump. Sure, he argues, she’s awful - but she’s only a 3 or 4 on the awful scale compared to Trump’s 10.
What this achronological approach doesn’t take into account is the role Palin played in shifting the Overton window back in the day, making Trump possible to begin with. Once the media realized a totally incompetent candidate got lots of eyeballs on their stories, Trump-as-candidate was all but assured. In a very real sense, Palin shaped the GOP into what it is today.
(Frank begrudgingly admits the point, but huffs that there were other Trump precursors. Still, his suggestion that Palin was no worse for America than Pat Buchanan hardly paints her in a positive light.)
(There’s another delusional thread where he appears to suggest that none of Palin’s more positive qualities - mom to many, lots of friends locally, initially popular politician etc. - has ever been given consideration in the media. Which is just wrong: there was many a puff piece about her back in the day. What happened is those puff pieces got drowned out by negative coverage due to Palin’s own actions. If there’s ever a politician who was done in by her own limitations it’s Palin, but for some reason we’re supposed to bend over backwards to ignore her own-goals and only linger on positive things.)
But none of Palin’s many, many very real and relevant flaws matters. For whatever completely unexplained reason, what matters to Frank is his belief that his role - everyone’s role - is to to accommodate her. There’s never so much of a hint that Palin is the one who needs to change her ways, learn about the world, improve herself. Instead, Frank suggests that the rest of us need to apologize for the fact we were so very mean to her back during her VP run, merely because her understanding of the world was “dangerously inadequate.”
This is what Frank imagines to be his feel-good conclusion to this stirring essay:
“[W]e don’t hate one another because we have a different sense of facts. We have a different sense of facts because we hate one another. Chip away at the distrust and animosity, and facts can be pooled once more. If we can tell a human story of Sarah Palin, maybe people can wish her victory or defeat instead of vengeful triumph or destruction. Maybe we can do that for all sorts of people, even when our gut hates the idea.”
Again, no suggestion that Sarah Palin needs to change even the slightest bit. You, on the other hand, do. You must come to love Sarah Palin.
Frank’s hero is clearly Winston Smith in 1984. Mind you, not the Winston Smith who reacts to a world growing ever darker by resisting. No, who he wants us to emulate is the Winston Smith on the last page of the book.
WaPo has at least enough decency not to print this as reporting, calling it “perspective” instead. But one wonders why they feel the need to print this sort of thing at all. Reading this only made me think less of both Frank for writing it and the paper for publishing it
