Palinmania worse than a media conspiracy

Wesley Pruden, editor emeritus at The Washington Times, is an old newspaper man like me, which is why I really liked his comment a week ago about the nastiness of the media campaign toward an amazingly ordinary, genuine hockey mom being attacked so savagely.

Barack Obama accuses John McCain of not "getting it." Sarah Palin says it's Sen. Obama who doesn't "get it." They're all wrong. It's the bloggers, the reporters, the pundits and the rest of the far-flung media that doesn't "get it." It's not the media's fault. There is no media conspiracy, vast or otherwise. The average reporter, correspondent, columnist, pundit or editor couldn't conspire with the entire Harvard Law School faculty to change the oil in his wife's car.

It's worse than a conspiracy. It's a consensus. The newsrooms of the agenda-setting newspapers, the television networks and the newsmagazines have become strongholds of the elites that Barack Obama, he of Harvard Law, insists he is not one of. The young men and women in the newsrooms of flyover country emulate the elites and sometimes dream of one day being one of them.

Once upon a time, we were just "newspapermen" - the word included two sexes, back when there were only two - and we were the sons and daughters of plumbers, firemen, shopkeepers, farmers, cops, steelworkers, over-the-road truckers and a lot of other men of toil and trouble. Most of us were veterans. Some of us were college graduates. Some of us were not. A few of us even went to church on Sunday. When we wrote about ordinary people, we didn't write about them as sociology. We were writing about our friends and our families, and there were hundreds of us across America.

Sarah Palin and her beliefs, her faith, her values, her on-the-job trials and household tribulations would not have seemed odd, or different, or strange to us. Nor would we have been surprised that Sarah Palin would touch the hearts of the Americans of flyover country. That's where we lived, too.

Like Pruden, I spent the huge majority of my working career in newspapers as a writer, photographer and editor. And left-wing idiocy is the “normal” there. There was a light sprinkling of conservatives in years gone by, but like Pruden, me and the dinosaurs, they’re gone.