Oh, there is no left wing media bias. LOLOLOLOLOL Remember Rathergate and did he not work for CBS? You would think they would learn but they never do.LOLOLOL
From Palin's book, Going Rogue, page 272-275 this has been FACT CHECKED by 11 different Associated Press Journalists.
I couldn't have known it then, but what transpired during the series of interviews and what CBS actually aired were two different breeds of cat. Camera crews shot hours of footage across the U.S; Katie and her producers decided on which fraction America would see-- and let's just say the emphasis was on my worst moments. Editing footage is nothing new, of course,' I created video packages when I worked as a sports reporter. But reponsible editing means you keep substance and context, and trim out fat. When I saw the final cut, it was clear that CBS had sought out the bad moments, and systematically sliced out material that would accurately convey my message. The sin of ommission was glaring.
For example, when John and I sat down with Katie for a segment in Columbus, Ohio, she started with an energy-related question. " Governor Palin, it will take about ten years for domestic drilling to have an impact on consumers, " the anchor said. " so isn't the notion of " drill, baby, drill" a little misleading to people who think this will automatically lower their gas prices and quickly?"
I said, " And it's why we should have started ten years ago tapping into domestic supplies that America is so rich in. Alaska has billions of barrels of oil and hundreds of trillions of cubic feet of clean, green natural gas onshore and offshore. Should have started it ten years ago, but better late than never."
That's the part CBS left in. They edited out a discussion of the need to wean ourselves off hydrocarbons and a call for America to stop spending billions of dollars on foreign oil when we could be investing it at home. Did Katie think Americans wouldn't be interested to know that I was in favor of alternative energy sources and reducing our carbon footprint? Or that I might be a conservative who was both pro-development and pro-environment? Perhaps my answer did not fit her agenda.
Katie then moved on to ANWR. " Experts say it will take almost twenty years.... to achieve peak production," she said. " And it would still only cut foreign oil dependency by about two percent and only for a little while...so is it really worth... the risk?'
I replied that I didn't know which experts those were. But I explained that as the chair of the AOGCC and IOGCC, I knew from the geologists and petroleum engineers with whom I had worked that it could be done a lot quicker. I also pointed out that ANWR is a 2,000-acre plot that's in the midst of 21 million acres. Americans needed to know how unconscionable it is that anti-development radicals use ANWR as their fund-raising poster child. They use bogus Photoshopped pictures showing moutains and waterfalls and lush forests with Bambi prancing to and fro. That's all fake and these fund-raisers know it. It is an absolutely barren, permanently frozen, remote sliver of land that requires a minimal drilling footprint, and its development parameters are equivalent to the size of L.A's airport. But neither Katie's question nor my answer wound up on the air.
I knew the media would distort my responses on social issues. But I thought surely they couldn't distort my economic and energy-related responses, because they would have to stick with the facts. I was mistaken.
Though Katie edited out substantive answers, she dutifully kept in the moments where I wore my annoyance on my sleeve. For instance, when she asked me how living in Alaska informed my foreign policy experience, I began by trying to frame the geo-graphical context. Lower 48ers grow up seeing our state tucked with Hawaii in a litte square off the coast of Mexico on the nightly news weather map. So I began by trying to squeeze a geographical primer into a ten-second sound bite, explaning that only a narrow maritime border separates Alaska from Russia, that we're very near the Pacific Rim countries, and that we're bordered by Canada.
But Katie interrupted and I did not complete my answer. I wish now I had stopped her and said, " here's the geographical context. Now may I answer your question?"
There was so much I could and should have said, and I later kicked myself for not doing so. There was much Katie appeared not to know, or care to hear about. For instance, that Alaska's geographic position makes our relations with Pacific Rim countries of great strategic import, and that we're the air crossroads of the world. That Russian bombers often play cat-and mouse with our Air Force near Alaska's airspace. That I dealt with Canadian officials on a weekly basis and have signed agreements concerning everything from security to salmon fishing and that NAFTA has significantly affected our economy. That melting polar sea ice has created trade routes but has also created security threats to North America. That Alaska takes on Japanese and Russian fishing trawlers that want to ravage the ocean floor. That Chinese and Russian energy companies had both sought access to ( and possible control of) our natural gas resources. That these and other countries were staking their own resource claims in Artic waters while the U.S sat on its hands. And that, yes, you can indeed see Russia from Alaska.
And those were just the foreign policy issues ( though issues certainly foreign to most governors). How much more I would have liked to say about Alaska's contribution to the U.S economy, its potential to help the nation reduce its dependence on foreign energy sources, and the delicate balancing act required to manage and responsibly develop our abundant wildlife resources.
But Katie wasn't interested in discussing these issues. And when I did, she didn't air them. Instead, when I tried to describe frequent Russian incursions by figuratively referring to Vladimir Putin entering our airspace, CBS researched the Russian leader's actual flight plan over the United States and called my statement inaccurate. And when I referenced Alaska's narrow maritime border to describe our close proximity to other nations, CBS reported that the Coast Guard monitored the border and not the governor.
But Katie's purpose--shared by most media types--seemed to be to frame a "gotcha" moment. And it worked. Instead of my scoring points for John McCain, I knew that I had let the team down.
For all of you historically challenged liberals, you do know that during World War 11, the Japanese entered Alaska attempting to get a foot hold there. Thankfully they were beaten back.
Alaska is not an important state to you libs but the Japanese certainly thought it was.
Aleutian Islands Campaign - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
