“Piranhas of the Press” unfair to Sarah Palin, political writer says
The press should be ashamed of how it covered and treated Sarah Palin during and since the campaign, writes Carl M. Cannon, senior Washington correspondent for Politics Daily.
“The true villains in this political morality play may have been the press,” Cannon writes in an article titled “Sarah ‘Barracuda’ Palin and the Piranhas of the Press.”
Cannon describes himself: “I’m not a Republican or a conservative; I’m a lifelong journalist who was born and raised in this profession…” He writes:
The mainstream media is undergoing its demise, drip by drip, day by day, and its practitioners, which include most of my friends in life, are under considerable pressure. In my opinion, however, these pressures do not excuse the treatment accorded Sarah Palin. On the contrary, to me the entire Sarah saga revealed that it wasn’t only the traditional media’s business model that is broken. Our journalism model is busted, too.
He offers numerous examples of what he considers unfair press coverage. And his key example — and the subject of much of his article — is the vice presidential debate held in St. Louis:
The reason is what happened when the battle over Sarah Palin came to a head on Oct. 2, 2008, in St. Louis, Mo. That night, the press showed its colors - and they were Democratic blue. That was the night that Palin cleaned Joe Biden’s clock in their only debate, and nobody in the media could even see it, let alone report it. That was the night that the dual blinders of ideology and elitism prevented us being honest brokers.
Later:
Facts matter, the man said. But they didn’t in 2008, not when it came to Joe Biden (our guy) against Sarah Palin (odd outsider). The ladies and gentlemen of the press were more interested in her hair, her glasses, her wardrobe, her accent, her sex life, her kids’ sex lives, and her hunting habits than in whether her opponent knew anything about foreign policy, the Constitution of the United States, or the job he was running for. They still are. The relentlessly negative coverage of Palin goes on unabated — she’s the subject of a much-ballyhooed hatchet job in Vanity Fair this month — even as Biden makes minor news from time to time by continuing his penchant for gaffes, this time while serving as the second most powerful person in the federal government.
Steve Parker is the deputy managing editor for news, and oversees the Post-Dispatch's front page. STLtoday's online news editors are on his newsroom team. Parker has been at the paper since September 1980. 
Palin cleaned Biden’s clock? Hmmmm. Can I have some of what Mr. Cannon is on? There’s only one loose Cannon here, it seems.