Now that Palin Story fits their template: Update: Weigel responds

Last week I had two posts about how the very effec­tive Sarah Palin speech was totally ignored on air by the MSM say­ing in part:

Why has there been so lit­tle on the air about this? For the same rea­son why you will not see the full clip of Palin’s speech embed­ded in MSM sites or why there was no com­men­tary this week­end. Watch­ing the actions of the left tend to cause peo­ple to dis­like them while watch­ing Palin in con­text tends to make peo­ple like her.

and

media Bias is mostly made up of sins of omission

Well Dave Weigel (a nice enough guy in per­son BTW) is now cov­er­ing the ques­tion of cov­er­age but with a twist to fit the media tem­plate:

But is it a mys­tery or sign of bias when an author and for­mer vice pres­i­den­tial can­di­date gives a speech at a rally and it doesn’t get national news cov­er­age? Man­sour, Nolte et al know that con­ser­v­a­tives have all the access they want to Palin’s speechempha­sis mine, through live-​streaming and other videos. It doesn’t mat­ter whether the media cov­ers it.

Two lines on the page give away the game:

First the Title: Pay Atten­tion to Sarah Palin!. This is pejo­ra­tive, sug­gest­ing Palin is des­per­ate for cov­er­age and atten­tion and thus unwor­thy of it. The title allows Weigel to por­tray Palin as irrel­e­vant dis­miss­ing a major speech in the Madi­son the cen­tral national bat­tle­field of state bud­get battles.

Next the key quote: Take a look at this sen­tence from his piece con­ser­v­a­tives have all the access they want to Palin’s speech. Exactly! Why would any non-​conservative be inter­ested in what Sarah Palin says? There is no need to report what she says to non-​conservatives, they don’t need to know.

And lets note what the story doesn’t con­tain, no embed or link to his MSNBC com­ments that he refers to, no link or embed to the videos of the Palin speech that the dis­cus­sion is about. Nor­mally such links would be a given in such a piece, but they’re not here. Why not? Remem­ber the quote from the top again:

watch­ing Palin in con­text tends to make peo­ple like her.

Mr. Weigel is read by peo­ple on the left and inde­pen­dents, to include these links would defeat the pur­pose of the arti­cle (Mock­ing Palin and her sup­port­ers) rather than inform them of what she actu­ally said or did. Thus he Mat­tie Fein’s her, turn­ing the story of an effec­tive speech in a key bat­tle­ground state into a story of her sup­port­ers as petu­lant chil­dren, fit­ting the MSM/​Journolist approved template.

This is more evi­dence to me that Sarah Palin is not only a viable can­di­date, but that the media still (as Rush has sug­gested) fear her. Peo­ple who are pay­ing $4+ a gal­lon for gas and lin­ing up to get jobs at McDon­alds are look­ing for strong lead­ers. The last thing the MSM wants to do is high­light one.
Update: Weigel very politely responds, a peek:

Well, I linked the entire video of Palin’s speech ear­lier in the week. (He’s right the link is here dtg), It was newsy inso­far as any speech by a poten­tial 2012 can­di­date is newsy. But here’s a scoop: Few speeches get cov­ered the way politi­cians would like them to be cov­ered. The White House spent a good bit of time putting together a deficit reduc­tion speech last week. What do you remem­ber from it? You prob­a­bly remem­ber that it looked like Joe Biden was asleep for part of it. Why was Palin’s “tar­get map” a big­ger story than her speech? The shoot­ings in Tuc­son over­whelmed all other news, Palin was unfairly wrenched into the story, and Palin — and Rebecca Man­sour — responded in a sort of odd way to this. (Man­sour, you’ll recall, told Tammy Bruce that the tar­gets on the map were orig­i­nally “surveyor’s symbols.”)

Now myself I would have included the link to the ear­lier post and men­tioned said cov­er­age, the lack of it made me assume (incor­rectly) that it hadn’t been cov­ered, but I stand cor­rected on that point.