Sarah Palin Soars as News Media Wilts; Is There A Connection? What Do They Mean, Redefine the GOP?

After the presidential election results were in, the mainstream media, apparently realizing it had gone further overboard than usual in its despicable treatment of Alaska Governor and GOP Vice Presidential nominee Sarah Palin, decided to cut her some slack.

In an effort to make voters forget that it had gone on an orgy of character assassination and voter manipulation through bogus "polls" and savagely inaccurate "stories," the media suddenly backed off a bit. But just a bit. We even had a mini-outbreak of positive publicity about Gov. Palin.

Americans, those who truly are Americans and usually don't work in the media, were way ahead of the non-Americans who do work in the media. Suddenly the non-Americans in the media have produced new "polls" that aren't really any more reliable than the bogus polls used before the election, but the new ones now say her popularity is rising. How incredibly surprising.

This mind you, in the wake not only of some of the most vicious personal assaults since the heyday of Stalin and Hitler's propaganda machines, but also from remorseless attacks on Palin from the incompetents - or Democrat plants - who ran John McCain's presidential campaign.

Can you believe that these Nimrods - the same people who without Palin's authorization went on a spending spree in Manhattan's priciest clothing stores and then blamed Palin for spending too much on clothes - tried to cover their own asses, after McCain fell through his, by saying she brought the campaign down?

Let's get it all out on the table shall we? The one thing the pollsters were accurately predicting before the election was an Obama landslide and the only reason he didn't get it was McCain's choice of Palin for his VP running mate. If she hadn't been on the ticket, McCain would have fared just about as well as Mondale vs. Reagan in 1984.

Meanwhile, as reporters, editors, producers and publishers suck up to political elitists in the hopes that in the next election the media won't be a non-entity - as it should have been this time - the public is responding by turning off the media in a big way.

In Connecticut, two daily newspapers that at one time were stalwarts of the region's fourth estate - The Bristol Press and the New Britain Herald - are on the auction block and slated for closing if no one will buy them. This is not an anomaly.

The Journal Register Company has hired a broker to sell newspapers it owns not just in Connecticut, but in Pennsylvania and Michigan too.

Then we have the Hartford Courant, Connecticut's largest daily newspaper which bills itself as the country's oldest in continuous publication. The Courant has shrunk physically to the point that it looks like an enlarged roll of paper towels with gag writing on it instead of news.

Even though Connecticut's population has increased along with the nation's, the Courant's daily circulation has shrunk substantially and last summer it reduced its editorial staff by 25 percent. That was on top of less obvious shrinkage in staffing and coverage that had been going on at the Courant for years.

Nationally, the New York Times is suddenly a shining example of larger papers that no longer are considered viable investments. It too has shrunk to the point that its motto, All The News That's Fit to Print should be changed to Just What Fits. The reason is the same one as the decline in readership at papers like the Courant, the Herald and the Press. The public no longer trusts the media, and with good reason.

The Times' pro-communist, pro-terrorist bias is well known. Its treasonous publications of national security matters that put our troops who are fighting the War on Terror in even greater danger has been well documented. But even on a regional level the bias is equally intense, it just covers a smaller area.

The Courant gave overwhelmingly favorable coverage to Democrats in the recent election, including imposing a virtual blackout on coverage of the GOP candidate for Congress in its own district. In fact, the absence of coverage of the GOP candidate was so blatant that a case probably could be made that the Democrat received unreported in-kind donations of free "advertising."

It bears noting here, however, that there were bright spots in the darkness of the media blackout. Dennis House from Channel 3 television did a great job of covering both sides of the Congressional election.

And Steve Collins of the Bristol Press was out front every time with his blog column. In fact, when others refused to even mention that a Republican was in the race for Congress, Collins was writing in-depth articles giving fair coverage to both sides.

It is unfortunately true though, that Collins and House were the exceptions rather than the rule.

Meanwhile, Sarah Palin is finally free of the constraints of campaign handlers who obviously didn't want her on the ticket, and the results are clear. America is seeing the real Sarah Palin and discovering why she had such high favorability ratings in her home state before the Democrats' media propaganda machine kicked into high gear.

As Palin goes about the business of building a solid foundation for whatever may transpire in four years, the Republican Party is said to be working to reestablish itself. Some factions are saying the party has to be reformed and redefined with a broad liberal agenda to make it palatable to a wider ranger of voters.

I agree with the other side that says there is nothing wrong with the core values of the party, but there sure as hell is something wrong with offering up candidates who don't live up to them, don't adhere to them when they are in office, and turn out to be something else, even though they wear the GOP label.

If this last election was lost because the GOP didn't attract enough women and minorities, then the real job ahead of us is to communicate with women and minority voters exactly what the GOP has to offer them, versus the Democrats. We also have to communicate with - or write off - Jewish voters who went for the Democrats nationally in a big way, despite McCain's claims that he would cut into that demographic.

But first and foremost the GOP has to field candidates who really are Republicans and adhere to the values of the Republican Party.

Sarah Palin is at the top of that list, as is Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal. I don't expect either of them to get much of a break from the media. It has its own agenda and will follow it lemming-like right down the sewer.

Republican candidates will have to find new ways to communicate with the voters and circumvent news organizations that will never give them a fair break or anything remotely resembling competent, unbiased reporting.

If the GOP is to reemerge as a true competitor it doesn't have to redefine itself, it just has to live up to its own definition, and do a far, far better job of communicating that definition to the next generation of voters.