Sarah Palin's Staggering Hypocrisy

The former Republican vice-presidential nominee keeps on bashing the media – which is odd, since she is the media.

The hypocrisy is staggering.

Sarah Palin keeps on bashing the media – which is odd, since the truth is she is the media.

The one-time GOP candidate for vice president was at it again in a recent issue of the New York Times Magazine, railing against how the “lamestream media” continues to distort her record.

Come again? You actually want American voters to believe you’re not part of the media establishment? Let’s see ... as a Fox News Channel contributor, the telegenic Alaskan is on television constantly. She and her family are also the stars of their own TLC reality show, Sarah Palin’s Alaska. The program was created by Survivor executive producer Mark Burnett – it doesn’t get much more Hollywood than that.

Palin also put out a bestselling book, Going Rogue, last year. Her second effort, America By Heart, came out this week. So she has conquered print media too. She is entrenched in so-called new media, with more than 310,000 Twitter followers, while her Facebook page is “liked” by another 2.4 million people. After her brief stint as a governor, Palin – who studied to be a journalist in university – now spends her time among journalists: “I’m on television nearly every single day with reporters,” she said in the Times piece.

As blogger Meghan McCain pointed out on The Daily Beast, Palin’s strategy to win the Republican presidential nomination in 2012 is one of “total media saturation.”

But despite the way she has linked herself to the media, Palin insists she is not a member of the journalistic elite.

Yeah, right. How many Americans can say their daughter was the star of the hottest prime-time series on network TV? That’s the very definition of elite.

None of the hypocrisy has anything to do with the fact that Palin stands on the right side of the political spectrum. In fact, she’s following in the footsteps of some big-name media heavyweights on the left who have made careers out of complaining about the media.

The person who perfected this strategy is, of course, Michigan filmmaker Michael Moore. Moore has the highest-grossing documentary in movie history, Fahrenheit 9/11, on his filmography. He has also published numerous books, including Stupid White Men and Downsize This!. All the while, Moore has been a fixture on the small screen, producing such programs as The Awful Truth and TV Nation.

And how many U.S. citizens can say they’ve won an Academy Award? Along with Moore, only an elite handful. Also remember that Moore is the guy who showed everyone else how to establish a web presence for the purposes of communicating political messages to the faithful. For someone who is so clearly a card-carrying member of the media, his laments about the agenda of mainstream journalists come off sounding ... odd. Dude, if you’re not the media, then who is?

Bashing the media: good for power-seeking celebrities, be they on the left or the right or even in the centre.

This article was originally published in the London Free Press.