NYT: The Public Editor
The Scrutiny of Sarah Palin
By CLARK HOYT
Published: September 6, 2008
Steve Schmidt, John McCain’s chief campaign strategist, told The Washington Post last week that the news media were “on a mission to destroy” Sarah Palin and that The Times in particular had written “an absolute work of fiction” about how she was vetted before becoming the Republican vice presidential nominee....Scores of readers joined the chorus....
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...(T)he Times article that drew the strongest complaints from the McCain camp was the one that questioned not her record but his judgment. Published on Tuesday’s front page, the morning after Palin announced her daughter’s pregnancy, the article said that revelation and a series of lesser disclosures called into question how thoroughly McCain had examined Palin’s background. The article, researched by five reporters and written by Elisabeth Bumiller, quoted anonymous sources as saying that McCain had been holding out hope of choosing Senator Joseph Lieberman instead, and that a campaign team assigned to vet Palin more thoroughly had not arrived in Alaska until the day McCain asked her to be his running mate. A number of Alaska political figures said on the record that they had not found anyone who had been asked anything about Palin by the McCain campaign....
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...(T)he main thrust of its reporting on the vetting process appears to be holding up. The Post said the next day that a lengthy in-person background interview of Palin by the head of McCain’s vetting team did not happen until the day before she was chosen. It also acknowledged that it had been incorrect when it reported that the F.B.I. had checked out Palin. In her home state, the Anchorage Daily News reported that it had found only one person who was asked anything about the governor before McCain selected her. That was the attorney representing her in an investigation of whether she had abused her power in office.
“We stand by our reporting,” said Richard Stevenson, the editor in charge of Times election coverage....
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By choosing a running mate unknown to most of the nation, and doing so just before the Republican National Convention, John McCain made it inevitable that there would be a frantic media vetting. It turns out that Palin was for the Bridge to Nowhere before she was against it, that she sent e-mail complaining about a lack of disciplinary action against a state trooper who was going through a messy custody battle with her sister, and that she never made a decision as commander in chief of the Alaska National Guard, one of her qualifications cited by McCain.
The drip-drip-drip of these stories seems like partisanship to Palin’s partisans. But they fill out the picture of who she is, and they represent a free press doing its job, investigating a candidate who might one day be the leader of the Free World.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/07/opinion/07pubed.html?pagewanted=all
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