As potential 2012 presidential candidate and former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin made her way up the U.S. eastern seaboard last week, the so-called mainstream media struggled to keep up since Palin made it known she wouldn’t be playing by their rules — which included giving them an itinerary of her journey. Did this turn the media coverage somewhat hostile against Palin and her bus tour? For Politico, perhaps.
In a June 3 filing from Seabrook, N.H. by Politico national political reporter Kasie Hunt, Palin’s bus tour was described in a headline as a “rolling menace.” The piece took issue with the bus tour for its lack of respect for traffic laws.
“Sarah Palin’s bus is plastered with a mock-up of the U.S. Constitution,” Hunt wrote. “But her entourage — both the three-vehicle motorcade that includes the bus and the smaller, two-SUV version she uses for smaller events — hasn’t been very respectful of traffic laws. They speed. They run red lights and stop signs. They make last-second lane changes to get off the highway, sometimes without signaling.”
And that, according to Hunt, made it very difficult for the media to cover the tour.
“So do the reporters following them,” Hunt continued, referring to those chasing Palin’s traffic-rules-ignoring tour bus. “Journalists in the caravan trailing her ‘One Nation’ tour bus describe the experience as harrowing, a rolling menace careening up the East Coast in hot pursuit of the former Alaska governor who declined to provide any advance itinerary of her tour over six days on the road.”
But was Politico predisposed to criticize Palin, regardless of how she handled her bus tour?
When comparing Politico’s coverage of Palin to CNN’s coverage, which is hardly a right-of-center outlet, one might draw that conclusion. CNN political reporter Peter Hamby gave a somewhat different account of how Palin handled the media, as he reported on June 4 for CNN.com from Portsmouth, N.H. Hamby said there might have been some difficulties at first, but Palin came around.
“In the end, Sarah Palin made nice with what she likes to call the ‘lame-stream’ media,” Hamby wrote. “Reporters were kept in the dark about Palin’s whereabouts during her ‘One Nation’ bus tour and were forced to depend on sources or tips from park rangers to figure out which historical site the former Alaska governor might appear at next.”
As reporters overcame that hurdle, however, Palin embraced their questions according to Hamby.
“But once reporters tracked her down, Palin was eager to engage. At stop after stop after stop, she answered questions on everything from energy subsidies to the debt ceiling to her favorite brand of designer jeans. At times, it seemed like Palin was going rogue all over again,” said Hamby.
In fact, Hamby called much of the criticism aimed at Palin by the mainstream media for not playing nice “inaccurate.”
“The Palin team’s stubborn and unconventional game plan also fed an inaccurate media narrative that the potential presidential candidate was actively ignoring the media,” Hamby wrote. “Quite the opposite.”