The state of Alaska is planning to release more than 24,000 e-mails sent by Sarah Palin during her brief governorship today. The move was the result of public records requests first made after her being picked as the Republican vice presidential nominee in 2008. The obvious intent was to hamstring the then governor as part of a Democratic Party strategy to make her life miserable by burdening her with investigations. It was this pattern of harassment and the burden of legal bills that ensued, as much as anything else (including the financial benefits of life as a one-woman media conglomerate and television celebrity), that led to her resignation in 2009.
Almost three years later, it’s not clear what the point of the e-mail dump is today. But that has not stopped the media from rushing to the Palin e-mails as if it were another gold rush in the Klondike. For example, liberal-leaning MSNBC has teamed with the more openly leftist journalists from ProPublica and Mother Jones to hire a research company to compile a database of the documents. But the mighty New York Times has its own solution: enlist its readers as part of an army of e-mail snoops sifting through the e-mails. The Washington Post is asking their readers to do the same thing.
What motivates these publications and their civilian volunteers to spend so much time going through every Palin communication? The answer is obvious. Leftists who hate Palin will spend days, if not weeks, sifting through boring routine communications as if they were panning for gold in order to find something embarrassing or silly that can then be published in order to humiliate her. Of course, what they are really hoping for is to find is evidence of some unnamed and unproven wrongdoing or corruption. That is because ideologues cannot conceive of a political opponent as being merely wrong but must, instead, try and prove them to be criminal or evil.
I have no brief for Palin. She is a flawed public figure whom I have criticized sharply. But there is something unseemly if not indecent about the way publications like the Times and the Post have embraced this project and sought to involve readers. If Palin has done anything wrong, she should account for her actions. But there is no reason to believe that any of this “investigating” has anything to do with a reasonable suspicion of malfeasance on her part. Rather it is just a crude fishing expedition whose end result will in all likelihood produce evidence of nothing worth writing about.
That Palin’s e-mails should be the object of such abnormal attention is testimony to her celebrity as well as the malice that she provokes in her political foes. It is, in a way, a tribute to Palin’s ability to keep the national spotlight focused on her. But no one, especially not the mainstream newspapers and their civilian collaborators that are taking part in this absurd hunt, should be under any illusion that what they are doing here has much to do with responsible journalism.
