An Angler Named Palin

There’s a competition between newspapers and the blogosphere for details of Republican Vice-Presidential candidate Sarah Palin’s life. Bloggers have the clear advantage.

When Sarah Palin was introduced as the Republican Vice-Presidential candidate, traditional media journalists were just as unprepared as bloggers were. The race for her biographical details was on.

Hourly reports appeared about “troopergate,” the firing of colleagues from Wasilla’s city government, disparaging remarks about Hillary Clinton, Palin’s disdain for the office of the Vice-President, and a lot more. The bloggers had the advantage. Los Angeles Times internet expert David Sano saw no place for the daily newspapers here: “Who wants to wait that long?”

The most important source on the internet was Alaska’s largest daily newspaper, the Anchorage Daily News and its online archives. Since last week, the paper’s website, adn.com has gotten up to 1.5 million hits a day, probably people looking into Sarah Palin’s past.

The newspaper had digitized their older articles, for example a piece from 1996 in which it was reported that an angler named Sarah Palin had tricked her husband into driving her to Ivana Trump’s perfume show because “we Alaskans so desperately crave every spark of glamour and culture.”

Palin’s hometown newspaper in Wasilla, the Mat-Su Valley Frontiersman, has only a sketchy online digital archive but is trying to catch up. According to their editorial staff, the McCain campaign didn’t go to the trouble of doing any research in their print archives. McCain’s campaign, meanwhile, complains that the media is infringing on Palin’s private life.

The major newspapers and television networks only began covering Palin’s children after she herself announced that her 17-year old daughter was pregnant. It was different in the blogosphere. The liberal DailyKos had, several weeks earlier, blocked a contributor who had reported on Democrat John Edwards’ affair. But the day after Palin’s nomination, they spread the rumor that Palin’s newborn son, Trig, wasn’t hers but her daughter Bristol’s.

Atlantic Monthly commentator Andrew Sullivan, conservative but an Obama fan nonetheless, also used the unfounded rumor in his blog. While he did backpedal after Bristol’s pregnancy was made public, he still insisted Palin should make her son’s birth records public.

Since then, he’s been heavily criticized by pro-McCain bloggers. Democratic blogger Mickey Kaus, who had stubbornly investigated Edwards’ infidelities and was vindicated in the end, sprang to Sullivan’s defense.

According to Kaus, even unproven rumors can be made public on the internet: “The public’s craving for the sensational quickly brings up opposite proofs that get a lot of attention.” In that way, DailyKos didn’t only spread the rumor about Palin’s baby. By publishing a photograph, they were also most effective in disproving it.