Covering Palin

By Jonathan Bernstein

Should the press pay attention to Sarah Palin?

In the wake of yet another Palin fiasco -- what Dave Weigel called a "strange and, frankly, immature" attack on the author Joe McGinniss -- Greg Sargent asks:

At what point do Sarah Palin's attacks and smears become so vile and absurd that they no longer merit attention? Is there such a point? ... Despite the ever-mounting ridiculousness of her claims, she continues to get attention. This isn't so with other figures. Frequently those who traffic in absurdity and smears to get media attention keep upping the ante until their assertions become so grotesque and self-parodic that they are no longer newsworthy.

Good question, easy answer: As long as she's a leading candidate for the presidential nomination of a major party, the press should be covering what she does.

The problem is that we're currently in the murky time period when no one has announced their presidential intentions, but there's no question that the nomination battle has begun; in fact, it certainly had begun by November 2008. Probably sooner. Candidates such as Tim Pawlenty and Mitt Romney are currently contesting the Republican nomination for president of the United States in the 2012 election cycle. Now, whether they will still be doing so by the time of the Iowa caucuses in 2012 is impossible to know. Some candidates drop out because they're doing badly, and others probably do decide, as Walter Mondale said in 1976, that they don't have the "fire in the belly" for it, at least this time around. For many, it's probably some combination of those things. But we know the kinds of things that candidates do, and Sarah Palin is doing enough of them (endorsing candidates, giving speeches to activists) that it makes sense to say that at least for now, she's running. (As Josh Putnam puts it, candidates are running for 2012, regardless of whether they'll be running in 2012). And if she's running, she clearly has at least a realistic chance of winning the Republican nomination.

And that's pretty much it. She should be covered because, as a leading candidate for the Republican nomination for president, what she says is newsworthy. The same goes for the other leading candidates. They are newsworthy to the extent that they are leading candidates, and in my view editors and producers should try to assess as best they can who those leading candidates are (using polls, endorsements and comments by informed observers and participants and evidence of campaign activity).

Now, that doesn't mean that the press should be in the business of just transcribing whatever Palin and the other candidates say. Also, coverage should certainly be in the context of a candidate's history. Because Palin is well known for getting things wrong -- death panels! -- and for launching personal attacks cloaked in self-pity, her new claims should be assessed and reported on a different basis than those of a candidate without such a history. I also think it's reasonable for reporters to emphasize in Palin's case that she doesn't take questions from the press, unlike virtually all other pols. It's hard, of course, for the press to cover a candidate who doesn't tell the truth without inadvertently just amplifying falsehoods or smear attacks, but it can't be correct to try to solve that by just ignoring her.



Jonathan Bernstein blogs about American politics, political institutions and democracy at A Plain Blog About Politics, and you can follow him on Twitter here.