Investigative reporting or something else?

Today, the state of Alaska is scheduled to release 24,199 pages of emails Sarah Palin sent and received during her time as Governor and the media is drooling like a wild pack of dogs. Have they really nothing better to do?

The mass email request began in 2008 as critics and news organizations looked for anything they could find on the vice presidential nominee who was taking the world by storm. Although it’s only been three years since Palin stepped on the national scene, the request to retrieve these emails is hotter than ever and in January, the Alaska attorney general declared that the e-mails had to be released by the end of May.

With the release of such a large amount of emails, The New York Times and Washington Post have even go so far as to recruit readers to help them investigate Palin’s emails in hopes of finding that one email that will finally give the media the smear campaign they’ve been looking for.

Is this really what it’s come to? I’m all for investigating politicians, and with the possibility wide open of a potential Palin run for the presidency, I think it’s relevant that we know about Palin’s history. However, why does it seem as though these requests are only directed at one person? It would definitely seem as though this energy could be used for investigating candidates who have already declared. Frankly, the same media barely vetted the guy actually sitting in the Oval Office and Americans hardly know anything about his career as an attorney and whether or not he was a good student. Let’s not even get into the whole birth certificate thing. But when it comes to Sarah Palin, you can peruse through the former Governor’s old e-mails with ease.

Greta Van Susteren of FOX News weighed in on the issue on her blog, GretaWire. Van Susteren said, “If however a news organization is seen as having a bad motive–ie on a mission to destroy someone rather than trying to assemble noteworthy information and report–it is not journalism but something else. Palin should not get “special treatment” or a “media colonoscopy” simply because the media can’t get enough of her…doesn’t like her…or thinks it will spike readership or viewers to cover her. If the foregoing are the reasons for hiring the extra help to go through her emails (the outsourcing) the public is better served by the Post and the Times (and others) using their resources chasing down other stories…for instance, pouring over documents showing exactly where the dollars are going that are being spent on defense contractors in Afghanistan.”

However, the media insists on investigating Palin. What else is there for Americans to learn about Sarah Palin? Palin thinks not much.

“I think every rock in the Palin household that could ever be kicked over and uncovered anything, it’s already been kicked over,” she told Chris Wallace on “Fox News Sunday.”

But the media’s obsession with Palin continues, so as Van Susteren calls it, “the media colonoscopy” will commence.

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As published on Examiner.com Investigative reporting or something else? – National Sarah Palin | Examiner.com http://www.examiner.com/sarah-palin-in-national/investigative-reporting-or-something-else#ixzz1PA4EfYER