Sarah Palin is set to give CNN their first interview, but by the looks of things, I wouldn't expect it to be a particularly rigorous one. As Mark Halperin reports, "Tuesday she'll be interviewed by CNN's Drew Griffin, to air on all three hours of the 'Situation Room.'"
Naturally, Halperin's not clued into any of the relevant details, so here's what you need to know about Griffin: he's an investigative reporter, not the typical type to be doing a candidate interview. But it's not necessarily an odd fit, because Griffin was the reporter behind CNN's prior hagiography on Palin, Sarah Palin Revealed. Griffin's involvement really starts to seem strange when you consider that he was CNN's man on the "troopergate" matter, and he got it wrong. As TPM points out, his conclusion on the story was this: "But please tell me if you think [Trooper Mike Wooten's] tale -- dubbed Troopergate by Gov. Palin's political enemies -- is really the scandal that will bring down the newest star on the political scene."
Of course, in the end, while the scandal didn't "bring down" Palin, such a blithe dismissal wasn't warranted, as it was eventually found that Palin had, in fact, "unlawfully abused her power as governor."
Griffin has also famously struggled with the facts as reported by his own network. In this clip, Griffin contradicts two previous CNN reports on Barack Obama's connections to William Ayers. In doing so, Griffin upholds the crackpotty "reporting" of Stanley Kurtz, and intimates that the Annenberg Challenge Fund -- a committee on which both Obama and Ayers served -- was some sort of nefarious organization. From the way they are described in Griffin's report, the actual activities of the Annenberg Fund are no different from any of the generic grant review activities I was involved in as a contractor to the Federal government. Naturally, I, too, could make those activities sound evil by affecting a pointed, paranoiac inflection in my voice:
And, in this clip, while Griffin correctly notes that the only "fraud" that was committed when ACORN registration drive participants turned in bogus registrations was fraud against ACORN itself, Griffin goes on to allege numerous connections between Obama and ACORN. These include charges that Obama was a community organizer for ACORN and that he trained ACORN volunteers. Neither is true. He also makes it sound as if Obama personally defended ACORN in court, when actually, Obama was one of a team of lawyers who, working in tandem with the U.S. Department of Justice, sued on behalf of numerous groups to get the Motor Voter Bill enforced.
Would it be fair to say that Palin is making out pretty well, then? You betcha!