Palin wants to ‘help’ mainstream media: ‘I have a journalism degree’
Click here to view this media CBN aired for the first time Wednesday clips of an earlier interview where former Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin explained that she just wants to help the mainstream media. “Much of the mainstream media is already becoming so irrelevant because there is not balance, there is, in many cases, David, there is not truth,” she told CBN’s David Brody. “I know that firsthand. I lived it every day.” “And what would give me great joy is if what would become irrelevant is just the untruthful, the misreporting out there. I want the mainstream media — and I’ve said this for a couple of years now — I want to help ‘em. I have a journalism degree. That is what I studied. I understand that this cornerstone of our democracy is a free press, is sound journalism. I want to help them build back their reputation and allow Americans to be able to trust what it is that they are reporting. We are so far from being able to trust what so many of the mainstream media personalities, characters feed the American public that it scares me for our country. What would give me great joy is what would become irrelevant is the misreporting that comes out of the mainstream media.” Palin also shared her thoughts about Twitter. “I’m so thankful for the 140 characters, I’m going to use every single one of them. If you go back and you look at my tweets for the most part, it’s 140 characters on the nose. I want that space,” she said. “We’ve been griping about it for years in the world of media, that a politician, any person cannot get a real idea across in a ten-second soundbite. Why do you think we can get anything across in 140 characters? A lot of times, our tweets just create more confusion and more problems than they provide solutions.” Dave N.: Palin has trotted out this line previously, and I commented on it back then : A word about Sarah Palin’s journalism degree: She and I graduated from the same school, the University of Idaho. (She arrived at the school a year after I graduated.) The difference is that when I attended there, I was highly active in the communications community, and was editor of the school paper for a year. Sarah Palin, in contrast, never even wrote a story for the Argonaut, let alone for the J school’s other chief outlet, the UI News Bureau; no one at the school’s TV station remembers her or has any record of her doing work there. Indeed, the professor who signed her degree barely remembers her, as she was one of those students who simply showed up for class, got a grade, and went home. Given that kind of background, Palin was lucky to even get a shot at sports reporting for a small Alaska TV station, which was the extent of her actual experience as a journalist. So it hasn’t been surprising to watch Palin attack the “lamestream media”, because she is obviously someone whose understanding of modern communications is eggshell-thin, and whose insights are about as deep as Bristol Bay at a minus-5 tide. The idea that this woman considers herself capable of reforming the media is enough to give any professional journalist the shudders.
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Palin wants to ‘help’ mainstream media: ‘I have a journalism degree’
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on July 21, 2011. Filed under