Monday, October 27, 2008

Palin Shows Her Disdain For Local Press

Sarah Palin has made herself famous for brushing off questions on a national stage, such as her insulting behavior with Gwen Ifill at the VP debate. When asked questions by well-known media personalities such as Charlie Gibson, Katie Couric and Brian Williams she consistently stumbled and made a fool out of herself. Now that local reporters are getting a chance to interview her, the freedom to ask questions of the Disasta from Alaska has been severely curtailed.

From ThinkProgress:

Gov. Sarah Palin (R-AK) granted an interview to a local CBS affiliate in Des Moines, Iowa on Saturday, much of which was filled with talking points that Palin has repeated in a number of local interviews recently.

However, after the interview, reporter Cynthia Fodor revealed that she had to submit the interview topics in order to talk to Palin, something she called “not standard procedure”:

HOST: Governor Palin, as we know, doesn’t give a lot of interviews so did you have a lot of time to chat with her?

FODOR: No, in fact this was the only one she gave today and we were limited to about five minutes of time which is not a lot of time and we had to submit which topics we wanted to discuss ahead of time which is not standard procedure.

I guess it all depends on what you define as "standard procedure." For journalists that care about the freedom of the press, then it is a testament to the way things are going for the Fourth Estate in our country. For Sarah Palin and like-minded Republicans, it is the way of doing business.