Watching the Palin media watchers

Bob Owens of Confederate Yankee blog reports for Pajamas Media on Sarah Palin's rally in Greenville, NC, at the campus of East Carolina University. But though Owens reports Palin gave a rousing speech, his main reason for being there was to watch the media's coverage.

7:27 PM The traveling media stampedes in, laptops fired up and ready to go. Palin’s motorcade must have arrived.

7:32 PM Palin comes out, and the crowd loves her. Warms up with “Sportstown, USA” and ECU’ football’s upsets over West Virginia and Virginia Tech… “you know something about underdogs.” Mentions Biden: Biden gets booed. Good speech so far, steady, and well delivered.

7:38 PM “Despite what Barack Obama says”… Boos, “Nobama!” McCain will give healthcare tax credits to help you pay for coverage. It’s broadly the same speech that she gave this morning in Florida, but she seems to be feeding off the crowd — giving off a lot of energy, considering how long her day has been. I can’t make it out, but several of the traveling journalists have the same screens up on their laptops. I’m guessing that it is a copy of the speech, and they’re making sure she’s not going off script.

7:43 PM Looking down under the camera crew setup, I notice a scowl on the faces of a couple of crew members when Palin thanked the military. I hope that her comments weren’t the cause of the dirty looks. One guy in the traveling crew packs up his laptop and leaves… I guess he’s confident he won’t hear anything new, and perhaps he’s right as far as the speech goes, but what about the crowd? Don’t they care about the crowd reaction? Apparently not.

7:48 PM Lots of press are checking their email and websurfing now, with the The Trail and Bloglines being two sites I can make out immediately. Several others are frantically typing away on Blackberries… When Palin gets to line about Obama starting his career in the living room of a domestic terrorist, crowd loves it. The media looks around briefly, then seems to lose interest in Palin.

7:53 PM Angry-looking, local female journalist in front of me is pounding on her keyboard. I could make out normal notes, plus a comment about Palin: “sounds like a robot, but the crowd loves her.” Hmmm… maybe it’s you, ma’am? A few other media are now websurfing — Yahoo News and the News and Observer’s Under the Dome blog.

7:56 PM MSBNC’s First Read joins the reading list. Somebody else is on a site with a color scheme and layout that looks suspiciously like the Huffington Post. An Asian man — presumably a journalist — looks at the crowd with an arched eyebrow, but I don’t know why. I heard him speak later to his companion, but can’t make out the language.

7:58 PM The speech is now over, and Palin walks down into the crowd to shake hands with folks on the floor. Shania Twain’s “She’s Not Just a Pretty Face” plays her off. Nice touch.

There were no protests or hecklers.

“Watching the watchers” is an interesting game to play. The media is used to being the ones deciding the story, but don’t want to be the story themselves. I expected some of what I saw last night — the taking of phone calls during speeches and the sometimes fevered text messaging during the speech — but I must tell you I was surprised when some of the press simply stopped paying attention shortly after Palin made the Obama-Bill Ayers connection in the speech. They appeared to have been waiting for another “gotcha” moment, hoping for someone in the crowd to threaten Obama or call him a terrorist.

Some of the web surfing during the speech was no doubt legitimate. I suspect both MSNBC’s [6] First Read and and Washington Post’s [7] The Trail were being updated from the press row, and the authors were merely checking to make sure that what they posted came across correctly. The journalist reading Bloglines , a news feed aggregator, may have also been doing precisely what he should. But the Huffington Post?

At least it wasn’t Kos.

But the guy who packed up and left the press row after Palin got past the Obama-Ayers connection when he didn’t hear anything inflammatory from the crowd was a point of concern. So was the fact that so many journalists in front of me — perhaps a third of them, or even a little more — simply began tuning Palin and the crowd out after that point.

I understand the life on the campaign trail must be a grueling marathon of unending travel and 14-hour days. It has to wear everyone down, and people start to cut corners. The press allows themselves this as long as they get the broad strokes correct enough.

It does seem hypocritical, though, that these same frayed journalists then attack politicians on the same schedule, for even the smallest gaffe.

It’s a clear double standard.

But then, we’re getting used to that.