The Palin-Doesn’t-Know-Africa-Is-A-Continent-Meme was a complete hoax, and one that — despite some reservations — I pretty much fell for. Apologies.
Posted by Tom in Journalism
November 13th, 2008
For The Record
9 Responses to “For The Record”
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Apollo says:
I think it was very irresponsible for journalists to run that story without attribution. Anonymity in journalism is supposed to help protect genuine whistleblowers or people who legitimately fear unjustified retribution. Using anonymity to besmirch someone’s reputation and intelligence is an extremely poor use of the privilege. Even if this story had been true, using anonymous sourcing on a story like this was just grinding an ax without revealing whose ax it was.
American journalism is broken, and I’m not sure how to fix it.
November 13th, 2008 at 10:53 am -
Larry Sheldon says:
I think that anybody who fell for it gave testimony to both their stupidity and to the failure of our schools.
What is your take on the round earth thing?
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Tom says:
Gosh. Thanks.
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rbnyc says:
It doesn’t matter. If the left says you are stupid then you are. Case closed. Millions of people think that she is the female Dan Quayle….with absolutely no evidence. It’s pretty much like the Dan Rather debacle, “fake but accurate”. Large numbers who believe it will never learn that it was fake.
I’m going to be a little easier on you than L. Sheldon but I sincerely mean it when I say that anyone that gave more than a minute’s thought to this story doesn’t understand the concept of the “smell test.”
She would have needed to spend all her time snowshoeing around and shooting moose in order not you have somehow learned a little about Africa.There are plenty of idiots in this world but very few have worked their way from PTA to school board to mayor to governor. That is a person who has their nose in the game and has at least a fair amount of smarts.
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Jamie says:
The problem, Larry and rbnyc, is that after her conduct in interviews when put to the test with hard questions – this kind of story was entirely believable. In retrospect it might seem absurd but given her performance during the campaign, at the time, this may have been true.
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Larry Sheldon says:
The problem actually is: She is a trained journalist.
Your turn.
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rbnyc says:
Palin was such a bad interview that ……OK, wait. By the same standard, you would believe that Joe Biden believes that fire was discovered in the 18th century because, we all know what he told Katie Couric about how the Great Depression started in 1932 while FDR explained it on HDTV.
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Hubbard says:
When I first heard that Palin didn’t know that Africa was a continent, I thought it was verbal slip up on her part. Bad, but not as bad as her not knowing a Supreme Court case besides Roe v. Wade. Knowing at least a few Supreme Court cases should be a requirement for any vice presidential candidate. That unforced error made her vulnerable to other stories about ignorance.
Larry and rbnyc, she’s made blunders. The trouble with actual blunders is that they lead to too-good-to-check blunders getting air time. I might well back her in 2012, but she needs to prepare and not shoot herself in her high-heeled feet.
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Apollo says:
The trouble with actual blunders is that they lead to too-good-to-check blunders getting air time.
This is subject to a Joe the Biden exception, where the more blunders you make and the dumber they are, the less air time your blunders get and the more people fall back on the unfounded (and increasingly improbable) presumption that you’re smart.