Sarah Palin Teasing NBC

When I first heard Sarah Palin was going to be co-​hosting the Today Show Tues­day, my first thought was:

“This has to be an April Fools trick.”

Once I was con­vinced that this was for real my sec­ond thought was:

“Why on earth is Sarah Palin giv­ing NBC the ben­e­fit of her rat­ings draw when they and their sis­ter net­work MSNBC treat her as a joke.”

After all NBC under­stands that Palin is a huge rat­ings draw and up against Katie Couric and even big­ger one. Tens of Thou­sands of view­ers will turn into the Today Show that never did in the past, they will hap­pily take the day of rat­ings to embar­rass Couric on ABC and to get the num­bers. Why should Palin give her ene­mies his gift?

Now that I’ve had a day to sleep on it with­out my taxes hang­ing over my head it hits me that Palin has set a trap and has put NBC and MSNBC has fallen in it.

Con­sider: The MSM has a his­tory of ignor­ing any sub­stan­tive or actual state­ment of Sarah Palin for the sake of their “Sarah Palin is an idiot” mes­sage. They ignored her speech in Wis­con­sin at the height of the protests in the state, ignored her big for­eign pol­icy speech in Den­ver. Just weeks ago MSNBC’s Morn­ing Joe spent over a week on the HBO fic­tion “Game Change” while ignor­ing the Obama admin­is­tra­tions attack on Palin and her sub­stan­tive reply.

How­ever on Tues­day the view­er­ship of the Today show, who in the past has only seen Sarah though the fil­ter of the MSM will see Palin with­out dis­tor­tion. As her daugh­ter Bris­tol put it on her blog:

She’ll be a totally unique pres­ence, won’t she? (Just try to think of any­one else like her on television !)

No there is not. When the Today show audi­ence tunes in they will see a con­fi­dent intel­li­gent con­ser­v­a­tive woman who is the total oppo­site of what they have been told and her very pres­ence will make liars of all of those who have painted con­ser­v­a­tive women in gen­eral and Sarah Palin in par­tic­u­lar as an idiot, as I wrote last year:

watch­ing Palin in con­text tends to make peo­ple like her.

It will undo years of pro­pa­ganda that the view­ers have been fed, but the worse effect will be on the net­work itself.

For NBC the Palin rat­ings will be like the free sam­ples of an addic­tive drug. One hit will not be enough, the num­ber crunch­ers, the peo­ple who sell the ads will be ask­ing: ” Can we get those rat­ings again? Might we tempt Palin to return? ”

One they get a taste of the rat­ings the net­work will be under immense pres­sure to try to get Palin back on a reg­u­lar basis, either for Today or for another show, and as long as the car­rot of that dynamic is in play, what will the MSNBC “tal­ent” on their low rated cable net­work do? Will the peo­ple above want them to risk the chance of the coup or more prop­erly, what will they be allowed to do?

It should be fun.