Palin hit piece an example of shoddy journalism

Michael Joseph Gross of Vanity Fair is the kind of journalist you’ve come to expect these days.  He’s the kind of journalist that tabloid reporters look at with disdain.  The kind of reporter producing work that even TMZ photogs would consider beneath them.  He’s the kind of journalist you’d expect to find rooting through one’s garbage for some deep, dark secret to expose to the world.

His recent hit piece on Sarah Palin follows the same theme, entitled, “Sarah Palin the Sound and the Fury.” In this piece, Gross goes on a mind-numbingly long (10,000+ words) diatribe about Palin’s secretive, dark, backstage persona.

“Her on-the-record statements,” Gross says, “amount to a litany of untruths and half-truths.”

With so many words focusing on Palin’s life being a lie, one would imagine that the journalist had a host of witnesses, friends, or sources from which to pool information.  And indeed, Gross has plenty.  There’s just one problem.  He can’t name any of them.

Allow me to clarify.  It’s not that he can’t find any sources with actual names; it’s that they all have really weird names.  Names like . . .

• The bellhops in Kansas

• The bellman at a mid-western hotel

• The maids

• A onetime gubernatorial aide

• One close aid

• One aid (presumably not so close)

• A campaign aide (twice)

• One friend

• A woman, who was described by another person with firsthand knowledge of her situation

• Personal assistants

• Others who have worked with Palin

• A bartender at one of the town’s best restaurants

The author himself admits that finding people who actually know Palin is difficult.

In his own words, “virtually no one who knows Palin well is willing to talk about her on the record.”

Because of this, Gross apparently decided to hunt down bellhops and maids at various hotels for his hard-hitting piece.

Sweeping allegations in the column are so fantasy-filled, that one would expect an actual legitimate source to verify the claims.  Claims such as . . .

• She inhabits “a place of fear, anger, and illusion, which has swallowed up the engaging, small-town hockey mom and her family.”

• She uses Piper as a prop to “make a public display of maternal affection.”

• She speaks in “code phrases expressing solidarity with fundamentalist Christians.”

• That “anywhere you peel back the skin of Sarah Palin’s life, a sad and moldering strangeness lies beneath.”

• Wasilla is so frightened of Sarah that the place “feel(s) like . . . a place populated entirely by abuse survivors.”