Without question one of the most vehement, unapologetic Sarah Palin haters on national television is NBC's Norah O'Donnell.

So contemptuous of the former Alaska Governor is O'Donnell that she actually went to a Palin book signing event last week armed with crib notes to attack fans of the outspoken conservative.

Seeing this as the straw that broke the camel's back, Palin documentarian John Ziegler has called for NBC to fire O'Donnell.

In a piece he published at his website, Ziegler outlined his reasons:  

Cory Doctorow at BoingBoing.net notes that Associated Press has a warped view of fair use. While they try to get bloggers to pay a license fee to quote five or more words from AP articles, when it came to the Sarah Palin book they turned it inside out.

"The AP was determined to get the first copy," Oreskes [a senior managing editor] wrote, detailing how the writers learned a store had "inadvertently placed the book on sale five days before its official Nov. 17 release date." "They bought a copy, ripped it from its spine and scanned it into the system so it could be read and electronically searched," he wrote.

Not only is this an abomination of fair use, I don't think it's the least bit legal given they likely did it in part so 11 different investigative reporters could read one copy at the same time.

MSM polls may say a majority don't consider Sarah Palin qualified to be President (60 percent according to ABC News-Washington Post), but just as many people recognize the media's unfair hostility toward her. “About six in 10 Americans (61 percent) think Palin has been treated unfairly by the press,” a Fox News-Opinion Dynamics survey released on Friday -- and highlighted on Saturday's Fox Newswatch on FNC -- discovered. That's up from 58 percent in January. Half as many, 31 percent, said she's been covered “fairly,” with 8 percent answering “don't know.”

While an overwhelming 83 percent of Republicans consider media coverage unfair toward Palin, so do a solid 65 percent majority of independents -- and even a significant minority of Democrats: 37 percent. (PDF of the Palin portion of the poll of 900 registered voters taken November 17-19. Snip below the jump of the full results for the question: “Do you think Sarah Palin has been treated fairly or unfairly by the press?”)

NBC's "Saturday Night Live" offered viewers a parody movie trailer of the disaster film "2012" Saturday evening.

The premise: former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin and Fox News host Glenn Beck have been elected President and Vice President, and the world is coming to an end as a result.

In an apparent attempt at fairness and balance -- or maybe the real point! -- the "credits" jokingly showed the film was created by the DNC (Democratic National Committee) and authored by MSNBC's Keith Olbermann - "A Political Disaster of Epic Proportions."

"On Election Day 2012, Planet Earth is Going Rogue" (video embedded below the fold, h/t our old friend Ms Underestimated):

Martha Stewart on Wednesday said former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin is "a dangerous person" and "anyone like that in government is a real problem."

Speaking with HLN's "Showbiz Tonight" producer Jenny D'Attoma, Stewart also said Palin is "very boring" and "confused." 

Ironically, when asked if she has seen any of Palin's recent interviews, Stewart replied without recognizing the hypocrisy, "I wouldn't watch her if you paid me" (video embedded below the fold with transcript, h/t Mediaite):

Don't be surprised if McCain '08 campaign adviser Nicolle Wallace passes up future chances to vent for Rachel Maddow.

Wallace did not appear on the Maddow show, agreeing instead to go on the record off-camera with her criticisms of Sarah Palin's new book, "Going Rogue: An American Life."

Maddow told viewers of her MSNBC show Tuesday that John McCain held a conference call Nov. 13 and asked that if they wanted to respond to Palin's book, to "at least avoid being interviewed about the book on TV," Maddow said --

After introducing Lopez on her CNN Headline News program last night, Behar played a clip of Lopez's HBO special in which he said, "There are a lot of politicians that would be Latinos and a lot now who are Latino. Sarah Palin, Latina. Believe me. She's got all the signs. She works and her husband don't."  

Later in the segment, after commenting about Palin's lack of experience, Lopez stated, "I mean, the concept of Todd Palin being a stay-at-home dad-listen Joy, when I was a kid, those guys were called bums."

"Uh-huh. They're still called bums," agreed Behar.

The Associated Press "fact check" of Sarah Palin's new book wasn't enough. Now the left is just coming out and claiming Palin is a flat out liar. That was the argument made by Bella DePaulo in a Psychology Today blog entitled "Sarah Palin's Lies."

DePaulo, who has a Harvard Ph.D. in psychology and experience in analyzing lying, claims Palin excels at it. "From my post as an outside observer, it seems to me that Sarah Palin doesn't care much about the truth. In that way, she is a very special liar," she wrote in the Nov. 19 "Living Single" blog.

The article went on to say how "Palin seems to love the effect her disingenuous pronouncements have on her audience" and discounted Palin's comments about Obama "palling around with terrorists." (Apparently Psychology Today never heard about Obama's ties to William Ayers who "helped found the radical Weathermen, launching a campaign of bombings that would target the Pentagon and United States Capitol," according to The New York Times.)

Last year, Sally Quinn of the Washington Post found it "devastating" on PBS that Barack Obama would abandon his sulfurous religious mentor Jeremiah Wright, a man "lionized by some of the great white theologians in this country." Quinn questioned how Wright’s allegedly racist opponents can call themselves Christians: They "go to their white churches, and you wonder how they can call themselves Christians and still look at other people as though they are inferior."

In her role as the co-creator of the Post’s "On Faith" blog, Quinn is at it again, suggesting on Tuesday Sarah Palin was a rotten Christian in her book Going Rogue. "Palin's book is a screed against everyone who ever done her wrong." She jokes nastily that maybe it was God’s plan for Palin to "go rogue" from the tenets of Christianity:

GQ Magazine is telling a tale of two leaders. On the one side you have Barack Obama, champion of the left, leader of the mainstream media; GQ's Leader of the Year. On the other side you have Sarah Palin, pariah of the right, dangerous and poisonous to the American way according to an interview in the very same publication.

Think I'm kidding? I couldn't make this garbage up.

I'm not sure what accomplishments helped the Conde Naste publication come up with these dubious distinctions. Perhaps it is the tripling of the nation's deficit in 10 short months, bungling the swine flu vaccine, overseeing an economy with record double digit unemployment or pitting one American against the other with unpopular proposals such as socializing health care that made them annoint President Obama. Whatever it is, none of that is apparently as terrible as Sarah Palin who the author describes as showing back up on the scene despite having been "driven her back into her hole" after last year's election.

Sarah Palin is like the mole in that addictively frustrating, ultimately futile carnival game whack-a-mole. Just when we think we've driven her back into her hole, out pops the side-swept updo and rimless Kazuo Kawasaki eyeglasses from another burrow. Katie Couric plays her the fool; she discovers Twitter. The hard right champions her as the frontrunner for 2012; she leaves office. Lawsuits threaten to sack her; she comes up with death panels.

One year ago tonight, Thursday, November 20 -- like today, the Thursday one week before Thanksgiving -- MSNBC ridiculously plastered “BREAKING NEWS” on-screen for video of Sarah Palin at a turkey farm just after pardoning one, running more than three minutes of video of some turkeys being slaughtered by a man in the background behind her. Palin, then just weeks off the presidential campaign trail, was simply answering questions from reporters in her role as Governor of Alaska.

Filling in as host of Countdown, David Shuster scolded Palin: “She neglected to notice what was happening directly behind her -- in clear view of the television cameras. We've blurred out the goriest parts, but here's her interview, from start to finish.”

As the video ran, MSNBC displayed rotating chyrons with hyperbolic declarations, such as:

GOV. SARAH PALIN KEEPS TALKING WHILE TURKEYS GET SLAUGHTERED BEHIND HER

GOV. PALIN APPARENTLY OBLIVIOUS TO TURKEY CARNAGE OVER HER SHOULDER

H/t MRC's Jeff Poor. I urge people to read the blog entry that Jackie Seals, the impressive young lady that O'Donnell confronted, has written about her experience.  Not only does it provide fascinating background material about just what a set-up O'Donnell devised, it also catches Norah out in a fib.

As you'll note from an earlier update at the foot of this item, after O'Donnell began catching heat for her stunt, she went back on the air to defend herself.  Among other things, responding to charges she had confronted a young girl, O'Donnell twice claimed that her interview subject "voted in the last election."

Just one problem:  Jackie informs us that she is . . . 17.  Maybe Norah got confused with ACORN voting standards, but 16-year old conservatives [the age she would presumably have been at last year's election] don't go to the polls.

--------------------------

We all remember how back during the '08 campaign, MSM reporters would challenge people attending Obama rallies with uncomfortable truths about their candidate, along the lines "would you still support him if you knew he had the most liberal voting record in the Senate?" Or not.  I certainly can't remember any MSMer confronting an Obama supporter in such a way.

But let people line up to express their admiration for Sarah Palin . . .

Today on its Web site and in its printed version, the Chicago Tribune reported on the large crowds greeting former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin on her book tour.  More than a thousand enthusiastic admirers greeted her Wednesday in Grand Rapids.  Another thousand were already in line at 7:00 a.m. today for a book signing scheduled for 6:00 p.m. in Noblesville, Indiana.  Hundreds more gathered in line hours ahead of her appearance at a Ft. Wayne Meijer store.

The vision of Sarah Palin being cheered by so many common people in such common towns as Grand Rapids and Ft. Wayne and in such common venues as a Meijer store must be just too much for the deep thinkers at the Chicago Tribune.  Palin Derangement Syndrome kicked in.  Bad.  They had to provide their own version of what's happening.

"All this rightist hoopla is all so predictable," writes the newspaper's former national editor, Charles Madigan.  In the first part of the piece he decries criticism of Barack Obama's how low can you go bow to Japan's emperor and anti-Obama sentiment from the right:

Their congressional caucus, their blurting mouthpieces, their nattering nabobs of neocon nonsense, their Limbeckians (sounds like Jonathan Swift, doesn't it?) their addled and confused tea baggers, their Michelle Backmanians, they are all coming from the same place, a losers fantasyland where there is no reality other than what they think.

The attacks on former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin took an interesting turn Wednesday when MSNBC's Chris Matthews suggested that racism is at the heart of her support.

Much like mainstream media coverage of this year's Tea Parties, Matthews and "Hardball" guests Norah O'Donnell and Salon's Joan Walsh made an issue of how "white" the crowd was at a Palin book signing event in Michigan.

"This is a largely white -- almost no minorities in this crowd," reported MSNBC's O'Donnell live from the scene.

Matthews reiterated, "Well, they look like a white crowd to me," later claiming, "I think there is a tribal aspect to this thing, in other words, white vs. other people."

Walsh added, "I think you`ve got that same kind of paranoid tea party, maybe even birther crowd that talks about the Constitution, without really understanding what they are talking about" (video embedded below the fold with transcript, h/t Greg Hengler via NBer Thomas Stewart):

Tuesday’s World News with Charles Gibson showed clips of an interview between Barbara Walters and Sarah Palin which will air on Friday’s 20/20. At one point, Walters seemed to allude to the fact that there is a misconception that Palin once claimed that “I can see Russia from my house,” during the 2008 campaign, as evidence of her foreign policy experience. But Walters did not clearly identify those words as part of the famous Saturday Night Live skit as they were uttered by Tina Fey playing Palin on Saturday Night Live to parody what Palin had actually said in an interview with Gibson from September 2008. Walters:

On the business of “I can see Russia from my backyard,” what you did say to Charlie Gibson was that there were places in Alaska where one could see Russia. Do you still feel that Alaska’s proximity to Russia from whatever place you can see it, is significant foreign policy experience?

As Gibson and Palin discussed the conflict between Russia and Georgia, Gibson had asked last year, "What insight into Russian actions particularly in the last couple of weeks, does the proximity of this state give you?"

Newsweek's effort to take a stab at former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin on the heels of her book tour appears to be backfiring - at least from a legal standpoint.

Recently, the latest cover of Newsweek took an image of Palin that originally appeared in Runner's World magazine. Palin has criticized the posting on her Facebook page, as NewsBusters' Noel Sheppard reported. "The out-of-context Newsweek approach is sexist and oh-so-expected by now," she wrote.

And Newsweek's Jon Meacham insists the magazine did nothing wrong - that this is just the nature of what they do at Newsweek.

"We chose the most interesting image available to us to illustrate the theme of the cover, which is what we always try to do," Meacham said to the Huffington Post on Nov. 17. "We apply the same test to photographs of any public figure, male or female: does the image convey what we are saying? That is a gender-neutral standard."

The Left and the media may hate her, but Sarah Palin is a ratings sensation.

Such appears to be the case given the announcement that Monday's episode of "Oprah" was the most watched for the daytime talk queen in two years.

Palin even drew more viewers than pop singer Whitney Houston when she sat with Oprah earlier this year.

Just imagine all the sighs and rolling eyes in newsrooms from coast to coast.

As THR.com reported Wednesday (h/t TVNewser):

Last week, NPR president Vivian Schiller took questions briefly on washingtonpost.com about the taxpayer-funded radio network. When the liberal-bias question came up, she claimed "NPR tilts left! NPR tilts right! Frankly, we hear it equally from both sides -- or should I say from ALL since most issues are not that linear. The fact is, NPR takes NO sides."

When someone discussed the regular commentaries of NPR Senior News Analyst Daniel Schorr, she claimed: "Dan Schor [sic] is a liberal commentator. I will not deny that is true. So what do we do about that? We balance his views with those of conservative guest commentators who frequently appear on our airwaves."

But what if those conservative guests just happen to take a stand NPR likes? Case in point: on Tuesday night’s All Things Considered, NPR touted a Sarah Palin book review by "conservative columnist" Rod Dreher, who concluded: "She quotes her father's line upon her resignation this summer as Alaska's governor: Sarah's not retreating, she's reloading. On evidence of this book, Sarah Palin is charging toward 2012 shooting blanks."

Speaking of blanks, did Dreher really read the whole book? On his Beliefnet blog yesterday, Dreher blogged at 12:35 pm that he was 100 pages in. All Things Considered starts airing locally at 4 pm. Did he really finish the book and write a script before the taping?

NBC's Matt Lauer invited on Newsweek managing editor Dan Klaidman, on Wednesday's Today, to answer Sarah Palin's charge that the magazine's recent cover photo of her, in a jogging outfit, was "sexist," but Klaidman denied the accusation as he claimed: "Well, what it really represented was what the story was about, and that's what our mission is. I mean, look, since she's been on the national stage, there have been these questions about her gravitas, about her seriousness." The photo – which was a reprint of a Runners World cover – was, as Palin noted "taken out of context," and intended to diminish her as a political figure, something that even Lauer, to his credit, noticed as seen in the following exchange with Klaidman and his other guest, the Daily Beast's editor-in-chief Tina Brown: [audio available here]

MATT LAUER: But on this week, as she's launching this book that, that she wants to use to kind of establish herself and perhaps as a run for 2012, why that image? Why do you think that represented what she's all about at this point in time?

Fox News' Bill O'Reilly stated last night that "the left is now peddling Sarah Palin as a shallow demagogue who would lead us to tragic circumstances" during a "Talking Points" segment about the former Alaskan governor's continued assault from the left. He cited CMI's 2008 study, "How the TV Networks Have Portrayed Sarah Palin as Dunce or Demon" as evidence.

O'Reilly stated:

A study last year by the Culture and Media Institute, a conservative group, examined network news coverage of Mrs. Palin from September 29th to October 12^th as she campaigned. It was 69 stories about the governor. 37 of them were negative, 30 neutral, just two, two positive. Twenty-one of the stories portrayed Sarah Palin as unintelligent or unqualified. Eight stories used clips from ‘Saturday Night Live' to ridicule her. ABC News was hardest on Mrs. Palin, closely followed by NBC.