Did The Press Corps Unfairly Pick on Palin?

On Meet The Press this weekend, former presidential candidate John McCain, discussing his running mate Sarah Palin, gave a shout out to Politics Daily's Carl Cannon for this piece about Palin bashing by the media during the campaign. If you haven't read Carl's piece yet, you should stop reading this and click over to read it now. I'll wait.

Carl's shaming of our colleagues in the press for stampeding and trampling Sarah Palin made me embarrassed. Over the course of the campaign, I personally read, shook my head over, laughed at, linked to, quoted, and wrote many unflattering Palin posts.

He also writes that the liberal ideology of members of the press corps is partly to blame. Politically neutral journalists are rare and I admit my political principles tend to be on the "liberal" side of the spectrum. Many of my friends outside of journalism have worked for Democrats or in support of traditionally Democratic issues. Most of my friends in the profession also lean to the left. That said, while there are many politicians whose platforms I support, including Mr. Obama, there are none I would hesitate to expose for looking ridiculous, hypocritical, or uninformed.

I do agree with Carl that Palin's counterpart on the opposing ticket, Joe Biden, got a much softer ride in the media but I don't believe that was due to political bias. I was willing to give Palin the benefit of the doubt, but, after seeing her poor performance in interviews, it was hard to take her seriously. She did not seem very informed. And though Joe is fun to make fun of -- I personally have a long history of finding Biden insufferable -- the familiar pleasure of mocking him could not compete with the fish-out-of-water frontier flamboyance of the Palin family on the campaign trail.

This is embarrassingly shallow, but the woman on the GOP ticket was also more interesting to cover because she was a giant celebrity, unusually attractive and, with the help of doppelganger comic styling by Tina Fey, hugely quotable. We were groupies. From the moment the press corps and most of the country met the VP candidate at the Republican convention in St. Paul, we were hooked by her unusual background, her natural public speaking ability, and, for tabloid fans, the most oddball press release of any budding ticket in history.

Much was made by Palin critics of her itinerant undergraduate career but she actually completed more schooling than I did. I am not from the Ivy League-educated circle of news reporters that Carl cites in his essay; I dropped out of my state university my freshman year and found my way to journalism through an instinct for investigative research and a love of the written word. But when I find myself out of my league, I try to lay low until I bone up, ask experts and read in. I don't want to make a fool of myself; Washingtonians are a tough crowd.