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• Tuesday, September 23, 2008 08:53 AM

  Too Much Palin?

  It seems like virtually every letter responding to this and every other Palin article on Salon is complaining about the focus on her while "preaching to the choir." While I don't disagree that I'm sick of reading about her here as well, it seems that the letter writers are collectively forgetting some aspects of what makes journalism work. Talbot and Salon are NOT, by and large, reporting these things for our sake, but are reporting these issues so that other media outlets will have access to their discoveries. If Salon runs an article about her vicious use of other politicians and then her lying about it, maybe your local newspaper will read it and use it in a piece that WILL go to someone besides the choir. If Salon reports on the poor job she did as mayor, then maybe the local news station will find out about it and report it, or at least look into it, something they might not know about otherwise.

  Every publication everywhere can't all send reporters up to Alaska to do this digging. Instead, other news organizations rely upon those news organizations that do send people up North (or wherever) and use these articles as a baseline for some of their own research and reporting. Maybe they won't use this information, lord knows the "mainstream" isn't exactly run by idealists eager to overturn the corporatism that pads their paychecks. But some outlets will read these articles and begin bringing these issues to a larger audience than simply those of us who are already here.

  —TucoYohei Read TucoYohei's other letters
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