Media Malpractice: One year later
A year ago today I went head-to-head, live, with Matt Lauer on the Today Show during the coveted 7:30 a.m. slot. The purported occasion for this interview was the release that day of my documentary film on the 2008 election and its aftermath, “Media Malpractice… How Obama Got Elected and Palin Was Targeted.”
Of course, the only real reason the esteemed Today Show agreed to lower itself to have on a relatively unknown conservative filmmaker who was introducing only his second feature film was that I was providing them with fresh interview video of the then seldom heard from Gov. Sarah Palin. Obviously, this is roughly the equivalent to offering crack to a street addict. During the course of multiple interviews I did that day, NBC proved the basis of my film more than I ever could have on my own…
What has transpired over the past year since that morning provides an enlightening case study on the state of our political media today. But before I share with you what I have learned, let me state some of the basic facts from the last 12 months.
I have appeared on dozens of national television and radio shows to promote the film and traveled to twenty different markets from Anchorage to Boston in order to screen it in front of almost universally enthusiastic crowds. I have been arrested at USC while trying to shine light on the absurdity of them giving Katie Couric a journalism award for her badly slanted Palin interview, and I have had my microphone cut off by MSNBC while discussing the Palin/Letterman flap that a second Palin interview I conducted helped spawn.
The film itself was a massive critical triumph but, barring a miracle, will only be a modest financial success.
But, like any conservative documentary filmmaker with a modicum of sense, my goal in creating the film was not primarily to make money. Instead, it was to correct the historical record with regard to the outrageous and dangerous coverage of the 2008 election and perhaps even influence the narrative of Barack Obama and Sarah Palin by at least planting the seed in our cultural consciousness that what most people have been told by the media about these two figures is simply not accurate.
To this end, while I am not nearly delusional enough to think that the film or my efforts are primarily responsible, there is no doubt that there has been a substantial (and for conservatives, rare) victory in this realm. The evidence, both scientific and anecdotal, is now overwhelming that the majority of Americans rightly now believe that the media coverage of Obama has been far too favorable and downright unfair to Palin.
As for Palin, while she was bizarrely attacked from all sides for having the gall to do an interview for the film which boldly and accurately corrected the record about a Presidential election, it is my belief that this story ended up helping her by far more than simply providing the sometimes vastly overrated value of telling the truth. Weirdly, since it was her first interview after returning to “normal life” in Alaska, the coverage of that episode set the precedent that any time Palin speaks it is considered a media event. This phenomenon became so ingrained in the media matrix that still today even sometimes rather innocuous postings on her Facebook page often make major news.
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John is absolutely correct that there is an elite hierarchy of conservatives who make the rounds of the same talk shows, shill for whatever RINO Republican is in the news and generally don’t care about taxpayers and us ordinary peasants. They are personality-driven, not content-driven political stars, whose bloviating adds nothing to the public discourse. John is one of the few who lives his values, instead of just making talking points to elevate himself, as so many others do in the media-political sphere. As for Hollywood, don’t expect them to pay much attention to accurate, intelligent conservative documentaries. They’re too busy salivating over the global warming frauds and far Left loonies.
Sorax: We know of one conservative fraud for a certainty, and that is Mark Sanford. He and John Edwards are generally the same guy — Sanford’s just less kinky.
I am a proud owner of Media Malpractice. I knew that regardless of the way things went during his tenure in the White House, the MSM would deny shilling for Obama for a solid year, and embargo video clips proving their guilt. I wanted to have a record of it for future generations.
J.Z. didn’t get all the outrages (he had to fit it on one DVD), but he got most of the important stuff, and those invaluable post-vote interviews with the clueless Obamabots that knew all the dirt on Palin (true and false) and virtually nothing that hadn’t be fed through the let’s-help-Barack-make-history filter.
If there are conservative “stars” that are frauds please name them. I don’t doubt you(I have my own suspicions), and realize the injury this could cause, but if any man were to be so bold it’d be John Ziegler.
Conservatism shouldn’t be a vehicle to fulfill an individual’s ego. Particularly, if they’re undermining the movement in turn.