Fox News taking news direction from Sarah Palin

Today's edition of Fox News' America's Newsroom featured a segment on the question everyone has been asking about Sarah Palin's memoir, Going Rogue: why, exactly, did the Associated Press assign eleven reporters -- eleven reporters -- to fact-checking it? Co-anchor Alisyn Camerota wanted to know whether it was a case of good old-fashioned liberal media bias, or just good old-fashioned Palin hatred from the media, saying that "AP assigned eleven [dramatic pause] reporters to fact-check the book ... but similar books by President Obama, Vice President Biden, even Bill and Hillary Clinton did not get that same kind of scrutiny."

The premise of the segment mimics a Facebook communiqué from Palin herself, who, when the AP's fact-check was published in advance of her book's release date, complained that "11 writers are engaged in this opposition research, er, "fact checking" research!" As we've pointed out, and as Stephen Colbert wryly observed last night, there's no arena in which Palin is more proficient than making herself a victim, and Fox News is more than willing to lend what tattered shreds of journalistic credibility they have to this pursuit.

There are several perfectly legitimate, non-biased reasons for the AP to assign eleven ... reporters to the book. The first, and most obvious, is division of labor -- it's a big book, and eleven ... reporters can fact-check it much more efficiently than one or two. Second, Palin, for better or worse, is a very high-profile and polarizing figure -- arguably of a higher profile than either the president or the vice president when their books were released -- and someone who, if Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck are to be believed, will be the leader of the conservative movement going forward. She is deserving of scrutiny, no matter how much she and her defenders whine about it being unfair. Third, her limited track record thus far is pockmarked with blatant falsehoods, both big (Bridge to Nowhere) and small (the teleprompter at the Republican convention).

Strangely enough, the idea that Palin might need fact-checking was never considered by Camerota. The AP made just the first attempt at fact-checking the book, and additional analysis of Going Rogue by Media Matters and other outfits has turned up more falsehoods, distortions, and seemingly deliberate fractures of the truth. In short, the AP was completely justified in doing a thorough fact-check of Going Rogue.

That, in the end, is what is so interesting about the right-wing fascination with Palin, from Fox News down to the conservative blogs -- they are less interested in what Palin actually has to say than they are in what other people say about her. They do make some weak-kneed attempts at making her seem like a serious person, like Rush Limbaugh claiming her puffball of a memoir is a "substantive policy book," but for the most part she exists only as a vessel for outrage, someone through whom they can direct their anger at the "liberal media." And it's a role she's more than happy to play.