My book, ‘Bring Her Down’: How the American Media Tried to Destroy Sarah Palin, has just been released. The following is adapted from Chapter 7 of the book.

In the event of a possible Palin presidential run, it remains to be seen whether the media can pull off the same act with the same success twice. At first glance it would seem obvious that they can, because of the head start they’ve already given themselves. To a large extent, they’ve already made her into a political punchline. Millions of voters would be coming to this hypothetical race with a set of preconceptions about Palin that would be very hard to shake.

There are those—including many conservatives—who insist that Palin can never run for national office again because she was so effectively “Dan Quayled” by the media. It’s an image, they argue, that can’t be overcome. There’s something unsettling, though, about the idea that any politician—or any person—should resign himself or herself to being defined for all time by what the media says, particularly by the kind of grotesque caricature they created of Sarah Palin. In a way it’s even worse than the “It’s her own fault” meme that was used against her so many times: when her e-mail account was hacked, when her children were mocked, and so on. That meme at least assumed that she had a little bit of control over her own fate; the “She got Quayled and that’s it” meme suggests that the best thing that a political candidate damaged by the media can do is bow her head meekly and submit to her ordained fate.

On the other hand, in the process of creating those preconceptions, the media may have unwittingly thrown a few advantages Palin’s way. A good deal of what they did during the 2008 race was simply crying wolf: spreading rumors and making insinuations about her that were either untrue or grossly exaggerated. It may have begun to sink into voters’ minds that more often than not, after the media has begun proclaiming yet another Palin scandal, nothing really happens. The supposed lies and cover-ups about her family; the ethics complaints; the charges of incitement to racism, hatred, and violence—all of these and more have had a disquieting tendency to evaporate when seriously pursued.

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Before Americans took control of Abu Ghraib after invading Iraq, Saddam Hussein had used the prison to torture and murder political detainees. Reports say as many as 4,000 murders were committed there. There are numerous accounts of prisoners being found with missing limbs, limbs that were perhaps fed to one of the Ba’athist regime’s industrial-strength wood-chippers. But no one knew the name Abu Ghraib until 2004 when images surfaced of American troops sexually humiliating detainees at the prison.

Then, a media frenzy.

Round the clock coverage; thirty straight days of front page ink in the New York Times; The Economist, the Boston Globe, the Times, and others called for then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s resignation. As Peter Schweizer pointed out Monday, Harry Smith claimed on CBS that what happened at Abu Ghraib was a logical consequence of Bush’s policies. The images became the calling card of the national and international anti-war movement. The abuse was referenced in hit T.V. shows Family Guy and Arrested Development, among others. World-renowned artist Fernando Botero even toured the world with an exhibit of dozens upon dozens of his signature “volumetric” paintings (that means depicting morbidly obese people and animals) embellishing the cruelty that took place at the hands of American servicemen and women.

This week, Der Spiegel released photos of a similar incident. The Week sums it up well:

German news magazine Der Spiegel has published photographs of grinning American soldiers posing next to the corpse of an Afghan civilian. (See the graphic photos here.) The soldiers, Spec. Jeremy N. Morlock of Alaska and Pfc. Andrew H. Holmes of Idaho, are among five members of a rogue 5th Stryker Brigade “kill team” facing murder charges in the deaths of three Afghan civilians last year. Military commanders say they are bracing for an explosion of anti-U.S. anger akin to that which followed the Abu Ghraib scandal in Iraq. Is this as bad?

This is worse than Abu Ghraib: NATO leaders know these images “could be more damning than the photos from Abu Ghraib,” says Nitasha Tiku at New York. The photos from Iraq showed U.S. soldiers abusing prisoners, and that was bad enough. But these soldiers have been accused of “deliberately” murdering Afghan civilians. And these images might just be the tip of the iceberg — apparently, the Stryker “kill team” recorded their actions in 4,000 photos and videos.

So the Times itself, the paper who lead with the Abu Ghraib story without interruption for a full month, publishes a report that says these images are worse than Abu Ghraib. Yet, two days later, “Obama Ghraib” has already been bumped to page A20. But hey, who’s to say that article is more important than “Film Shows Babe Ruth, at Leisure and Up Close.” (more…)

Leave it to Andrew Sullivan.  It’s been 24 hours since I offered $100,000 for the full list and contents of the Ezra Klein’s four-year experiment in political-journalist editorial collusion — the on line progressive jazz fusion station known as JournoList.  A natural free for all of death-wishing upon their political enemies and other such innocuous scribblings.

It took 24 hours for Sullivan to proclaim that all the rules now were broken.

When Andrew Breitbart offers $100,000 for a private email list-serv archive, essentially all bets are off. Every blogger or writer who has ever offered an opinion is now on warning: your opponents will not just argue against you, they will do all they can to ransack your private life, cull your email in-tray, and use whatever material they have to unleash the moronic hounds of today’s right-wing base.

Yes, the Economist was right. This is not about transparency, or hypocrisy. It’s about power. And when you are Andrew Breitbart, power is all that matters. There is not a whit of thoughtfulness about this, not an iota of pretense that it might actually advance the conversation about how to deal with, say, a world still perilously close to a second Great Depression, a government that is bankrupt, two wars that have been or are being lost, an energy crisis that is also threatening our planet’s ecosystem, and a media increasingly incapable of holding the powerful accountable.

In fact, when one of the progressives on this list outed Dave Weigel, the actual rules were broken.  That leaker who destroyed Weigel’s career had agreed to the off-the-record nature of the 400-strong list; the minute the leaker went public with the material the story was no longer about Weigel but about the JournoList itself. (more…)

In the first (and still best) “Austin Powers” film, a United Nations representative makes a faux pas and calls the film’s villain “Mr. Evil.”

“It’s Dr. Evil,” he huffs. “I didn’t spend six years in Evil Medical School to be called ‘mister,’ thank you very much.”

This is how I feel when I’m referred to as a “blogger,” sometimes with a political qualifier like “liberal” or “conservative” attached. I’m a reporter. I’ve been a reporter since high school. Like a lot of other people, I lucked into some reporting jobs that took advantage of the speed of the web — thus, I blogged. And I left the Washington Post because I was intoxicated by this medium and the privileges of reporting. The leak of my private e-mails wouldn’t have been possible 10 years ago; but then, neither would have my career been possible.

Let’s go back to the start. I started in journalism in a fairly typical manner, by discovering how much I liked writing articles and doing interviews at my high school paper. I chose to go to Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism. It was there that I became editor of the campus’s weekly conservative paper, and became plugged into the campus conservative journalism network.

Was I really that conservative? Yes. (more…)

As a proud former staffer of Time Magazine, where I spent 16 mostly terrific years working with some of the finest writers and journalists who ever graced the business — you’re not going to get any snark from me about Time at the end of its glory years in the 1980s under the supervision of Time Inc. editor-in-chief Henry Grunwald and the magazine’s great managing editor, Ray Cave — I read the following story with a touch of sadness:

The Washington Post Co. is putting Newsweek up for sale in hopes that another owner can figure out how to stem losses at the 77-year-old weekly magazine.

The publishing industry has been struggling as businesses cut back on ad budgets during the recession. But Newsweek, along with Time magazine and U.S. News & World Report, faces a particular challenge finding a relevant niche in the age of up-to-the-second online news. Once handy digests of the week’s events, they have been assailed by competitors on the Web that pump out a constant stream of news and commentary.

Despite staff cuts, Newsweek has remained a drag on its parent company, which is also struggling with ad declines at its namesake newspaper.

Translation: Newsweek is pretty much dead, and now the only question is who’s going to rouge the corpse for a few more years, if anybody, to keep its collection of Morning Joe talking heads with at least the fig leaf of meaningful employment before the final axe falls.

In the New York Times, David Carr has some thoughts: (more…)