The Palin Family Story: Lessons About Internet Politics

September 2, 2008 – 4:27 am

There are already thousands of blog posts about the revelation that Sarah Palin’s 17-year-old daughter, Bristol, is pregnant. This post is not just another addition to the pile; rather, I think the story has a couple lessons about online political communication.

First, the (insert adjective) blogosphere has become a magic talisman in discussions of current affairs; it is whatever a speaker wants it to be. Second, this only accelerates the right’s remarkable ability to shoot the messenger.

As strongly pressed by the Obama team (Obama to media: Back off!), there is little political hay to be made over Bristol’s pregnancy. The Palin pick gives Dems plenty of ammo without touching this story. Even beyond her obvious inexperience, Palin carries very many serious liabilities, and we’re likely still learning more. Her family’s baby count isn’t a wise target. At best, it’s an opportunity to talk about sex ed policy, a position on which Palin is far out of the mainstream.

The crazy part of this story centers on the allegation (which I am not making) that Gov. Sarah Palin faked her fifth pregnancy to cover for Bristol–that the Palins’ youngest son, Trig, is actually their grandson. No political figure or news outlet of any weight will touch this allegation except to treat it as an internet rumor.

While most official news sources credit anonymous bloggers (even Huff Post does it) for their source on this allegation, it is most specifically attributed to dedicated DailyKos diarists–users who do not speak for the site. One user in particular stoked the flames with pictures and details; the original post was deleted in the last few hours in an obvious exercise of the site’s policy against poorly-sourced allegations of conspiracy and the like. Another user’s conspiratorial entry remains up for now.

The surface-level analysis would lead us to view this as an instance of one person getting attention in a way that was just not possible in the offline world. But why did it gain traction?

The few who chimed in on Kos and elsewhere would have remained on the fringe had the right not seized the opportunity to blame “liberal bloggers” and strongly insinuate that the Obama camp had a hand in it. Frankly, this is a crap allegation. Real lefty bloggers have plenty to say about Palin without picking on her daughter. In fact, here’s a mini linkfest summarizing the collective verdict of the actual, established liberal blogosphere:

Lee Stranahan, @ Huff Post: Palin ‘Definitely Pregnant’ With Trig

RJ Eskow, @ Huff: ‘Hey, Pundits, Leave Them Kids Alone‘

Kos: ‘I don’t think the evidence is there to claim Trig is Bristol’s son‘ (headline: ‘So Much For Abstinence-Only Education’, a more-or-less legit policy swipe at Gov. Palin)

Faiz @ ThinkProgress: basic rehash of pregnant daughter story, gratuitous swipes on reproductive policy issues

Andrew Sullivan of the Atlantic is the most legitimate source I could find even discussing the allegation as something worth rebutting, and he assumed it was false, urging Palin to release the medical records. “And then we can move on.”

For conservatives in this story, the liberal blogosphere serves as a magical uber-enemy: nameless, faceless, with untold power to spread lies to gullible swing voters. This talismanic quality is often attributed to the blogosphere, both in negative and positive terms. Liberals (Joe Trippi) and conservatives (Hugh Hewitt) alike have long sold partisan books promising that the internet will set “our side” free.

The truth about the internet is subtle, complex, and evolving. Things are different by a nontrivial yet nonrevolutionary degree. We could attribute any and every rumor to the internet, but until the mainstream media picks it up, it still doesn’t exist for most people on most days. I learned of the Palin story from NPR’s All Things Considered, and I study internet politics. In short, concerns about this rumor’s internet life were more theatrical than genuine.

One important difference that rarely gets described in adequate detail is the degree to which the internet allows collaborative, distributed production of knowledge and opinion. Many sources offline and on (including Drudge) explicitly credited DailyKos with the conspiracy theories expressed by unauthorized Kos diarists; this is either a convenient smear (again, Drudge) or a sign of real ignorance. A Kos diarist has almost as much free rein as a Blogger user; we don’t blame Google for the junk they host, but once a blogger hosts a blogging service, people get confused or deliberately muddy the issue.

Both search engines and browsing habits reward sites for getting inlinks. This leads to swarming. If there’s a noteworthy story, the internet collectively decides it is noteworthy by saying, literally, “Go read this.” This can also have the occasional effect of amplifying the visibility of garbage. (Think “girls” and “cup”.) With enough inlinks or the right kind of inlink, the linked-to site gains an authority it did not previously have; if this isn’t the lucky break for somebody who actually produces quality material, that visibility will wane over time.

This all fits quite well with the shoot-the-messenger trick that the right does very well. Whenever one is facing news that can be cast in a bad light, it can sometimes work very well to go on the offensive and blame those who would make hay of such news. Karl Rove should give PhD’s in this strategy.

If nobody’s talking about it because the story hasn’t yet broken, or if you need a newsworthy hook to bring the matter up on your terms, there’s no reason you can’t create the ideal media enemy. Rove did so with Bush’s cocaine bust and, possibly, with the forged Bush military documents leaked to CBS.

Of course, I have no specific evidence to support what I am implying here about the Palin conspiracy theory, but it was awfully convenient that the best-known liberal blog that allows end users to create their own posts just happened to have an incredibly well-documented post on the issue.

I can’t even take credit for this idea; many comments on the original post noted the similarities to earlier Rove tricks (including a joke about typeface) before the offending post was removed. The user had just one post prior to the story breaking out, but the removed post had many more photos and links than one would expect from a total noob.

Before you start making me a tin foil hat (follow the link above; this really has become a pattern), note at least one more piece of pertinent data: Palin’s staff removed an official state website containing a number of family pictures, replacing the site with a raw HTML page that reads as follows:

Object not found!

The requested URL was not found on this server. The link on the referring page seems to be wrong or outdated. Please inform the author of that page about the error.

If you think this is a server error, please contact the webmaster.

Error 404

gov.state.ak.us
Tue Sep 2 00:29:26 2008
Apache/2.0.55 (Ubuntu) PHP/5.1.2 mod_ssl/2.0.55 OpenSSL/0.9.8a

The words “referring page” and “that page” both link to the same DailyKos post as Drudge. Under what circumstances would it possibly be in a state website’s interest to dispel false rumors by pointing to their source? I would only recommend doing so if (a) the rumor is about to be discredited in a totally humiliating fashion, and (b) one has a desire to humiliate the target. In this case, check and check.

Further, the URL for this page is: http://gov.state.ak.us/photos.php , hardly an arcane, 80-character URL that one would expect to be associated with much churn. The link was correct and current–it actually did link to a page with relevant photos–as of August 29. Here’s a snippet from Google Cache:

 

Frankly, this is all just a little too convenient. A total noob at a top liberal blog adds to an infinite pile of diary entries, important people in the other camp notice and get offended, and the entry gets lots of link love–including links from Drudge and the official site of the public official who’s been implicated.

The story just happens to give the public official the perfect opportunity to take a swipe at the other team without actually naming names, all while embarrassing a hated blogger. And when it comes out, it provides an awesome vehicle to dwarf the story-ness of the actual, embarrassing story, making the news story about the messenger rather than the political figure at the center of the message.

If this truly did fall into Palin’s lap, she and her team made Mt. Everest out of a molehill. But excuse me if I’m suspicious of the nameless Kos diarist’s sincerity.

Thankfully, those who are actually important members of the liberal blogosphere did not bite. This could’ve been much worse.

UPDATE: Here’s a better link explaining how the 2004 CBS fiasco went down.

Also, I was somewhat relieved to talk to Tina this morning and get her impression of how the major media outlets are representing this. For those whose media world doesn’t include FReepers or Kos diarists, apparently the story is about how sloppy McCain was to pick Palin without a thorough vetting.

The Times, for instance, has a front page article quoting political figures on and off the record who claim that the vetting was shallow to nonexistent. Here’s my favorite quote:

Representative Gail Phillips, a Republican and former speaker of the State House, said the widespread surprise in Alaska when Ms. Palin was named to the ticket made her wonder how intensively the McCain campaign had vetted her.

“I started calling around and asking, and I have not been able to find one person that was called,” Ms. Phillips said. “I called 30 to 40 people, political leaders, business leaders, community leaders. Not one of them had heard. Alaska is a very small community, we know people all over, but I haven’t found anybody who was asked anything.”

Alaska has a small population and a microscopic group of politically connected folks. If a Republican former House speaker will go on the record that she doesn’t know anybody who got asked, it’s because there was very little if any real vetting.

Incidentally, that’s the second most emailed article right now. Number 1 is a piece by Maureen Dowd mocking the Palin pick as something that would strain credulity in a movie, let alone real life.

Also, ABC notes that the bipartisan state Senate committee investigating the Monegan firing was scheduled to release a final report on October 31. The Democratic state senator in charge of the investigation, Hollis French, alleges that McCain’s team is trying to stall this process to move the release date past the election.

French also echoes Phillips’ take, saying that nobody on the committee was contacted by the McCain team during the vetting process. The Alaska Daily News has a veritable roll-call of everyone who should have been contacted but was not. Neighbors, the recently-fired Walt Monegan, and a bipartisan roll-call of legislators all attest that nobody asked them anything.

I’m not sure McCain will back down, but this pick has at least resurrected the ghost of Tom Eagleton.

I suppose that’s enough partisanship for now…

ANOTHER UPDATE: Okay, I can’t resist. Check out the TPM post, Palin: A Scandal We Can Believe In!, complete with a YouTube clip of the local CBS affiliate’s coverage of the scandal.

This whole thing is absolutely crazy.