Anonymous Gossip, Newsworthy? One Standard for Palin, Another for Couric

One way to discern journalistic ethics is to ask journalists if they would apply the same standard of scrutiny to themselves as they apply to national politicians. Would that be fair? For example, the media was flagrantly attracted by anonymous McCain aides spinning ridiculous fairy tales about Palin as a "diva" and a "whack job," going "rogue" and disobeying the campaign bosses. She was a vicious, paper-throwing princess, a geographically challenged idiot who thought Africa was a country, and some sort of Desperate Housewives character who answered knocks on her hotel door wearing nothing but a towel.

These were people whose cloak of media-awarded anonymity allowed them to start up a high-speed, heavy-duty manure spreader and drive it like a drunken teenager across the Governor’s lawn in Juneau. But it did not matter how ridiculous this imaginary Queen Sarah was.

Liberal outlets like Newsweek and the New York Times leaped on the story. There were also media outlets who have not carried Obama’s water who forwarded these wild allegations, like Fox News, whose Carl Cameron reported the claims with a straight face. But this kind of anonymous back-stabbing is not a game that the media would find honorable or professional if it was applied to them.

Let’s remember Katie Couric, and the harsh unauthorized biography written about her by Ed Klein that came out in August 2007. She was a seriously vicious diva in between those covers. Klein used anonymous sources to make claims like Couric was so calculating that cynics at NBC took bets on how long it would take her to exploit her husband Jay Monahan's death. "Some said 72 hours; others just 24 hours," he wrote. He asserted Couric had an affair during her time at CNN in the 1980s with a married man who could advance her career. ABC, CBS, CNN, and NBC all predictably passed on that one. They don’t always skip out when Kitty Kelley manufactures trash against the Reagans or the Bushes, but they passed when the target is a journalist.

On Fox News, Klein came on "Hannity & Colmes," and Sean Hannity wasn’t welcoming Klein and his anonymous mud. "This is harsh stuff. Affairs with married men. Questionable behavior following her husband's death. She lost a husband....Two little girls. They don't have a father. I couldn't write a book like this about somebody's personal life. Why -- why did you want to write this? Why is that important to you?" Hannity added that this kind of scrutiny might apply to someone vying for national office, but "she’s a TV host."

The same politeness sufficed for the print press. Time and Newsweek didn’t touch the anti-Couric tome. The New York Times, which loved the Palin fairy tales (and the Kitty Kelley-authored ones), wouldn’t, either. The Los Angeles Times found no gossipy space for anonymous Couric dish. USA Today mentioned it in one sentence, reporting Couric had no comment on it. The Washington Post only raised it to denounce it in a book review.

Let’s imagine Sarah Palin would only run on a national ticket once – nobody assumes this today, but for the sake of argument, let’s say she never runs nationally again. Were the excesses of anonymous personal attacks in her media treatment over the last eight weeks warranted? Or were they examples of situational media ethics in a general-election hothouse?

Palin fans should be confident that this kind of anonymous rough-housing is being allowed not by media ethics, but by political ethics. In the most non-ideological media scenario, the public airing of these anonymous hit jobs may be driven by ratings-grabbing ethics. Gov. Palin is not only powerfully charismatic, but staunchly conservative, a combination that scares liberals right down to their organic-cotton-and-hemp socks.

For Palin, the only advantage of the anonymous manure spreaders is the backlash. Her latest round of interviews has been fairly sympathetic, since for the moment, she is more ratings-grabbing TV star than Democratic threat. She’s now liberated from the demands of being a loyal running mate. She can speak her own words and make her own calls. She is the great political hope for conservatives who have zero hope for an audacious Obama presidency. Hopefully, her anonymous detractors will climb under an anonymous rock and stay there.

But the media should be pressed to acknowledge that these stories of Palin’s extreme viciousness and idiocy were too implausible to air without skepticism. If they would not entertain stories that anonymous network employees say the anchormen are secretly paper-throwing divas who drive their underlings to tears – a scenario that most would find plausible without too much prodding – then they should have hesitated and done more reporting before they leaped on the Palin-smearing machine.