Sarah Palin: A Case Study of Distortion
Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin is providing journalism students an ongoing case study of how public figures can distort the truth.
Governor Palin should know better about the importance of truth telling since she graduated from the University of Idaho in 1987 with a degree in journalism.
The AP reports that she spent her final semester working as an intern for the NBC affiliate KTUU in Anchorage. She later worked as a television sports reporter at the same station. Clearly, she picked up some on-camera skills as this video demonstrates.
She used her facility with the teleprompter to good advantage at the Republican convention. Although she may be able to recite a zinger, unfortunately she left any journalistic ethics she learned back at the University of Idaho.
On the day Palin accepted the job as the Republican vice presidential candidate, USA Today reports that she said, “I told Congress, ‘Thanks, but no thanks,’ on that bridge to nowhere…’if our state wanted a bridge,’ I said, ‘we’d build it ourselves.’”
In the days since her coming out speech, Palin’s record on the bridge to nowhere has become clear. She supported the bridge until the Congressional tide turned against it because of national outrage.
In an interview this week, ABC news anchor Charles Gibson zeroed in on Palin’s fudging the truth.
GIBSON: But you were for it before you were against it. You were solidly for it for quite some period of time…
PALIN: I was …
GIBSON: … until Congress pulled the plug.
PALIN: I was for infrastructure being built in the state. And it’s not inappropriate for a mayor or for a governor to request and to work with their Congress and their congressmen, their congresswomen, to plug into the federal budget along with every other state a share of the federal budget for infrastructure.
If Palin were still a journalist, she would have violated the Society of Professional Journalists Code of Ethics’ first admonition which is to “… test the accuracy of information from all sources and exercise care to avoid inadvertent error. Deliberate distortion is never permissible.�
We’ve lived through the Iraq War, the very pretext of which was based on a lie. Now we face a potential vice president whose first public utterance after accepting the nomination is based on distortion.
It’s a good thing she’s no longer a journalist since she apparently doesn’t respect the truth telling that would have come with the job.
Tags: bridge to nowhere, distortion, ethics, sarah palin
October 11th, 2008 at 8:35 pm
Like any other politician, she changed her story once she got higher up. It isn’t surprising. Just imagine what she would do in office.
April 24th, 2009 at 9:18 pm
Well, looks like she is not a threat any longer.