Sarah Palin's highly anticipated visit to Fox News Channel's O'Reilly Factor saw the famously tough-as-nails host ask the tough questions of the right-wing leader:

O'REILLY: OK. The latest poll has you with a 23 percent favorable, 37 percent don't know. You do the math, OK. And you're up at 60 percent of people who could like you. You are the biggest threat because you are a star, media star, whereas you're the only Republican. There aren't any other Republicans who are media stars but you. Now, that's why they're attacking you so vehemently. Do you know that?

In other words, "You could be really popular some day, and don't know you know how that makes liberals crazy?"

Nothing but the tough questions from that guy.

A bit of NBC Nightly News last night, from reporter Mike Viqueria:

But now Mr. Obama faces more friendly fire. After a key committee passed a plan to pay for reform with a tax on high-cost policies, major unions, normally Obama allies, took out full-page newspaper ads complaining that the tax will hit labor hardest and vowing that, without changes, they say, "We will oppose it." And late last night opposition from a more familiar foe, Sarah Palin posting on her Facebook page and echoing insurance industry claims that the latest plan will mean higher premiums, writing, "Unintended consequences always result from top-down big government plans." After being blindsided by insurance industry attacks, the president hit back.

If you were a reporter trying to determine whose views on healthcare to include in the few seconds of time allotted for your story, would you really include a Facebook posting from the former governor of Alaska? Single-payer activists have to get arrested to try and make the news, but Sarah Palin just needs to type.

Jennifer L. Pozner has a version of her new NPR commentary on the Women In Media & News website she founded (7/8/09), in which she asks you to "think carefully: Can you remember any passionate TV news debates about whether journalists or voters might want to get naked with former vice president Dick Cheney?" If you're answer is no, that's not only unsurprising, but also, says Pozner, "good. Because such an insulting, irrelevant topic would--and should--never be considered newsworthy." She then calls attention to the fact that, "unfortunately, this sort of drivel frequently passes for journalism when the politician at the center of the story is female":

Take Alaska's soon-to-be-former governor, Sarah Palin. When she dropped her resignation bombshell--dubbed "breathless" "girlish burbling" by New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd--CNN's Rick Sanchez wondered, "Hey, could she be pregnant again?," while others chalked it up to post-partum depression. Meanwhile, MSNBC analyst Donny Deutsch told Morning Joe viewers that the Quittah from Wasilla is divisive specifically because: "This is the first woman in power with sexual appeal.... We're used to seeing a woman in power as non-threatening."...

The ugly, nonpartisan truth is that corporate media have always seen women in power as threatening. That's why they trivialize women who dare seek office by obsessing over their bodies, hair, shoes, makeup and motherhood--as if these have anything to do with their abilities and track records. Whether it's cable news branding Hillary Clinton a "bitch," the New York Times reporting that Condoleezza Rice wears a size six, or the Washington Post detailing Loretta and Linda Sanchez' hairstyles, housekeeping preferences and "hootchy shoes," journalistic double standards condition us to consider women as ladies first, leaders a distant second--and inherently less qualified.

Pozner describes the consequences: "We'll never know how many talented people were dissuaded from politics because they knew it would be significantly harder for them to run, win and govern." See the FAIR magazine Extra!: "Beyond Clinton & Palin: Coverage of Women in Election Misses Real Women's Issues" (1/09) by Julie Hollar.

A posting on Timothy Karr's Media Citizen blog (6/17/09) contrasts Crooks & Liars' collection of cable news pundits like Lou Dobbs and Bill O'Reilly likening the anti-immigrant Minutemen to a giant, friendly "neighborhood watch" organization with the "chilling double-murder" Minutemen leader Shawna Forde is accused of--describing "the 911 recording of the mother as she witnessed the execution of her 9-year-old daughter and husband. But what's even more infuriating is the way many prominent right-wing media pundits have made this group the darlings of 21st century patriotism":

Frank Rich's most recent New York Times column explains how crimes of this sort are part of a bigger problem egged on by right-wing media:

This homicide-saturated vituperation is endemic among mini-Limbaughs. Glenn Beck has dipped into O'Reilly's Holocaust analogies to liken Obama's policy on stem-cell research to the eugenics that led to "the final solution" and the quest for "a master race." After James von Brunn’s rampage at the Holocaust museum, Beck rushed onto Fox News to describe the Obama-hating killer as a "lone gunman nutjob." Yet in the same show Beck also said von Brunn was a symptom that "the pot in America is boiling," as if Beck himself were not the boiling pot cheering the kettle on.

We have a real right-wing media accountability moment. Ask yourself how this compares to the mainstream media's current obsession over David Letterman's apology to Palin.

Shouldn't they be more concerned about the harm caused by the shrill pundits of the right?

Seeing "a strange double standard in effect" here, Karr feels the murders to be so "horrible that it's silly to have to compare it to the Letterman/Palin affair. And yet the mainstream media seems to think that one deserves more attention than the other."

Blogging on "Greta Van Susteren's defensive response" to reports "saying that one of the reasons that Sarah Palin has been caught up in a 'series of public relations gaffes' is because she is 'taking advice from Greta and her husband,'" major GOP booster John Coale, the Huffington Post's Geoffrey Dunn (3/29/09) thinks the Fox News host "Doth Protest Too Much":

Let me give Van Susteren her due. This is a serious charge of direct professional misconduct, and there should have been more than a throwaway line from an unnamed source to back it up. The allegation begs further questioning.

But what Van Susteren does acknowledge in her "brief" on the subject is equally troubling:

1. She acknowledges that her husband, John Coale, has been advising Palin, that they are in weekly contact, and that he played a central role in the formation of her national political action committee, SarahPAC--all while she has been covering Palin for Fox News.
2. She acknowledges that her husband met Palin through Van Susteren's media contacts with the governor. In short, he used his wife's journalistic access to Palin to gain his own political access.

At least one thing is obvious to Dunn: "There are some serious journalistic conflicts of interest taking place here, and Van Susteren is either being duplicitous or disingenuous to characterize them as 'silly.'"

Upon seeing that, "on her show Tuesday night, Fox News' Greta Van Susteren devoted an entire segment to criticizing David Letterman" for having "made jokes about Sarah Palin and her family," Political Animal blogger Steve Benen (3/19/09) notices that

there seems to be a pattern here. In fact, it's hard not to notice that Van Susteren seems to enjoy closer ties to Palin than most media professionals. Matt Corley explained, for example, "In September, she hosted a one-hour 'documentary' on the GOP vice presidential candidate, titled Governor Sarah Palin--An American Woman.... After the election ended, Palin chose Van Susteren for her first national television interview. Since then, Greta has consistently covered Palin, keeping an eye out for any potential sleights of the governor and gushing over her popularity."

As it turns out, there's a reason that helps explain why Fox News' Van Susteren has taken on the role of media publicist for the Alaska governor--Van Susteren's husband helps guide Palin's political image.

[John] Coale, a well-known Washington lawyer and the husband of Fox News Channel's Greta Van Susteren... in an interview with the Fix, described himself simply as a "friend" of the Alaska governor but acknowledged that he suggested she start a leadership PAC and helped her navigate through some of the questions surrounding her family that lingered after the campaign. Others familiar with Palin's political team insist that Coale has far more power than he is letting on--essentially helping to run Sarah PAC.

Benen quite reasonably asks, "Doesn't this seem like the kind of thing Van Susteren might want to disclose to her viewers?" See the FAIR publication Extra! Update: "Sarah Palin: Maverick Feminist?" (12/08) by Candice O'Grady

Any lingering hope you may have harbored for corporate pundits to rise above their infatuation with John McCain running mate Sarah Palin will surely be dashed by Rich Lowry's titillated take (National Review Online, 10/3/08) on her debate performance--quoted in full:

A very wise TV executive once told me that the key to TV is projecting through the screen. It's one of the keys to the success of, say, a Bill O'Reilly, who comes through the screen and grabs you by the throat. Palin too projects through the screen like crazy. I'm sure I'm not the only male in America who, when Palin dropped her first wink, sat up a little straighter on the couch and said, "Hey, I think she just winked at me." (more...)

The affliction that causes national political commentators to project their own perceptions onto the public-- let's call it Pundit Projection Syndrome--is affecting David Gregory's ability to come to grips with the fact that the public just wasn't as into John McCain's and Sarah Palin's debate performances as he was. Last night on his MSNBC show, Race for the White House With David Gregory (10/6/08), the anchor demonstrated his confusion in a discussion with liberal-leaning pundit Laurence O'Donnell:

GREGORY: Yes. Lawrence, let me show you another number here, which pertains to the debates in particular. Which ticket is doing better in these debates, Obama/Biden 50 percent, McCain/Palin 29 percent. What surprises me about that is that I think both of these debates have highlighted pretty strong performances by both McCain and Palin. You can argue who won on points, certainly. But in both of those debates, they were strong performances. This polling doesn't bear that out at all.

Luckily, O'Donnell was able to talk Gregory down by injecting some needed reality:

There's no polling that bears that out, David. The polling we had that night from CBS and from CNN all indicated that Biden had a very big win, like giant margins over Sarah Palin, and that Obama, to all of our surprise, had a very significant win over McCain on the foreign policy debate, which was supposed to be the McCain winning debate issue.