Second, I am very Pro-Choice, which Gov. Palin is not.

Third, I am absolutely aghast that you could make such a sexist, non-feminist comment such as, ” It’s naturally to be suspicious of a woman Palin’s age, especially with much older kids, to wonder why she would knowingly risk having another child. ”

Be suspicious of a woman Palin’s age, my God, I thoughts comments like that went out with Wilma Flintstone!

Sorry, but more and more women with successful and vital lives WANT to pregnant over 40, and with increased awareness to our health, that is very real and not nearly as “risky” as throwing a more evolved attitude about woman and choice to the wind.

Shame on you.

I’m still amazed…

George

If she would have announced that her daughter is pregnant, no body would have come with the Trigg’s story. So, she wanted to hide something and when the rumor started circulating she was forced to reveal the truth. That way the rumor definitely served a purpose.

I also don’t remember Time, Newsweek, and evening news of other broadcast channels talking discussing the rumor. So what is she talking about, I don’t know. May be MSNBC had mentioned that but again MSNBS is opposite of Fox News in the left the difference is Fox spreads rumor under the coverage of news and MSNBC discusses rumors telling it that it is rumors.

There are a lot of people saying and thinking that the economy around the world wouldn’t be so bad if we could wake up in the morning and hear the news telling us that things were looking up – instead of being greeted with non-stop interviews with horrible bad news, assumptions, estimates, and predictions that things are indeed going to get worse. Worse sells.

Bingo! I’ve heard nuerous radio show hosts and TV hosts state that whenever they report on good news versus bad news, the ratings drop. Pretty weird that humans feast upon the bad news but don’t really care as much for the good news.

The run up and eventual conflict forced by the Hearst papers and others resulted in an unjustified war and needless bloodshed (sound familiar?). The Catholic-baiting, Irish/Italian-hating genre, you could hate two groups at once and hate them again because they were mostly Catholic, what a bonanza of hate! Catholics were accused of baby-eating (yes, believe it or not), I forget what the spurious nationalistic views were and I am too lazy at the moment to look them up (am I proving the point on myself?).

Maybe, after a period of extremely partisan and knee-jerk reporting journalism, we will return to balanced journalism that carefully reports the story, weighs the facts and measures the response. Maybe. Until then let’s all remember the lessons: you never pick a fight with people who buy ink by the barrel; freedom of the press is limited to those who own one (and freedom of speech follows closely behind, both freedoms are now broadening through use of the Internet, but the attendant responsibilities are lagging behind); and there are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics (my apologies to all original authors).

Who can we trust when all trust, like the news, is based upon assumption and conjecture?

That would be a decent explanation, except that bloggers like Andrew Sullivan played a key role in fanning the flames of the “she’s not really Trig’s mom” story, and he and others are not untrained amateurs and knew better.

Lorelle’s right about CNN having to fill 24 hours, but a lot of bloggers seem to have taken that need to fill space directive and run with it. And while we’re talking about Palin here, there was plenty of similar nonsense from right wing bloggers about Obama/Biden too.

At least in politics, a lot of blogs seem to have adopted the artificially polarized nature of cable news which involves checking your brain at the door and replacing it with a cheerleader-like mentality in which running with a story like the “whose Trig’s real mom” (or the equally nutty right wing stuff like “is Obama’s birth certificate a fake”) is done without even a second’s worth of stepping back and asking just how much evidence there is for this claim before running with it.

Bloggers, on the other hand, are not necessarily beholden to advertising, but (hold your flames) many are untrained in journalistic skills or do not wish to take a clear view of a situation, instead preferring to espouse a particular viewpoint things. While journalism with a viewpoint is not bad, it needs to be truthful and should be balanced with high quality journalism that remains without a viewpoint and completely explores a subject. Asking people to go to FactCheck.org or similar sites is a dream that will rarely become true.

Finally, the Republican Party ran the most atrocious campaign in a number of respects. All campaigns are given to stretching the truth and fudging on facts, but the Republican campaign neglected their own stories and essentially let the campaign become tossed on the current of the day. John McCain said “maverick,” but acted “Rove.” Sarah Palin was tossed to the piranha with only the barest thought of who and what she was or what she could represent.

Palin. McCain. The Republican Party. They can blame the media, all of the media, all they want, but their story and their reputation is truly theirs to own. They need to take credit for their failure, they just blew it.