This Just In: "'We Took Sides, Straight and Simple' Against Palin"

Tim Graham of Newsbusters quotes veteran White House reporter Carl Cannon of PoliticsDaily.com on the 2008 election:

On AOL Politics Daily, long-time White House reporter Carl Cannon bluntly declared that the political press gave Sarah Palin a raw deal in the 2008 campaign, and seriously failed to scrutinize Joe Biden, especially his fact-mangling and odd statements in the vice presidential debate. Cannon summed up:

In the 2008 election, we took sides, straight and simple, particularly with regard to the vice presidential race. I don’t know that we played a decisive role in that campaign, and I’m not saying the better side lost. What I am saying is that we simply didn’t hold Joe Biden to the same standard as Sarah Palin, and for me, the real loser in this sordid tale is my chosen profession.

Cannon suggested female journalists failed to make up for male sexism in Palin coverage because she didn’t match the kind of Hillary Clinton candidate they wanted to represent women in politics:

From the beginning, and for the ensuing 10 months, the coverage of this governor consisted of a steamy stew of cultural elitism and partisanship. The overt sexism of some male commentators wasn’t countered, as one might have expected, by their female counterparts. Women columnists turned on Sarah Palin rather quickly. A plain-speaking, moose-hunting, Bible-thumping, pro-life, self-described “hockey mom” with five children and movie star looks with only a passing interest in foreign policy — that wasn’t the woman journalism’s reigning feminists had envisioned for the glass ceiling-breaking role of First Female President (or Vice President). Hillary Rodham Clinton was more like what they had in mind – and Sarah, well, she was the un-Hillary.

But that was only after the far left had done a hatchet job on Hillary herself, as this early Silicon Graffiti from April of 2008 discussed.

Keep reading Graham’s post for Cannon’s takeaway on how the legacy media ignored all of Joe Biden’s myriad gaffes in the vice presidential debate.

And yes, this is deja vu all over again, as the more thoughtful members of the MSM issue their mea culpas after the election, all of which will be conveniently forgotten three years from now.

Related: “Elitism as Self-Congratulation.”