Exactly what the press should do
The BBC reports that John McCain and his team are criticizing the news media for asking questions about how the McCain team vetted the presumptive vice-presidential nominee, Sarah Palin.
Not to open a can of worms about who said what, and what should or should not be said or examined (such as the teenage children of candidates; I’m with Barack Obama on that one: Leave them alone), but it is precisely — and essentially — the role of the press in a democratic society to examine how our leaders are chosen and how well, or how thoroughly, their background has been checked.
It is right for journalists to ask who checked out the candidate, how many people were interviewed, how long did it take, and who did the vetting. These questions are proper and necessary.
By the same token, if the journalists learn that the procedures were conducted in the correct and proper ways, then the journalists should say so. And be done with it.
An extension of this, then, would be to point out that the media has failed to vet Obama himself, or even determine who has or has not vetted him. This would seem, to me, to be the larger failure, since Palin (despite her current media spotlight) is not running for the position of President.
September 3, 2008 at 2:31 pmHow has a guy who has been followed by the media for the past 20 months not been vetted? A Google news search of his name turns up nearly 334,00 links. A good deal of information seems to have been made available to the public.
While Palin isn’t running for president, Doris Kearns Goodwin reminds us that a third of our presidents took the office on the death or resignation of the elected president. Maybe we tend to forget that since it’s only happened twice since 1960.
September 3, 2008 at 5:05 pm