Below The Beltway

Late yesterday a website called Alaska Report News broke what it claimed to be an exclusive story that Sarah and Todd Palin were about to announce a divorce and that Palin was in the process of leaving Alaska altogether, with her children. I’ll admit that when I saw that story come across my Twitter feed late in the day, there was a momentary “whoa” reaction, but a quick read soon revealed that ARN’s report was based solely on a post at a blog called The Immoral Minority, which cited unnamed sources that seemed to have unusually intimate details about the Palin’s private life.

That fact alone, and the fact that no major news outlet was reporting the story, should have made any responsible blogger thing twice about even writing a post citing the report. Of course that didn’t stop some, mostly liberal, bloggers from doing so; such as the guys a Firedoglake who posted a pretty venomous piece that, as of the time this post is being written, hasn’t been updated to reflect the denial I note below.

There really was no story here, until………

Not too long after the story broke in cyberspace, and, most importantly, long before any credible news outlet picked it up, Palin’s spokesperson posted the following at her Facebook page:

Yet again, some so-called journalists have decided to make up a story. There is no truth to the recent “story” (and story is the correct term for this type of fiction) that the Palins are divorcing. The Palins remain married, committed to each other and their family, and have not purchased land in Montana (last week it was reported to be Long Island).

Less than one week ago, Governor Palin asked the media to “quit making things up.” We appreciate that the more professional journalists decided to question this story before repeating it.

Of course, as Tommy Christopher points out, the divorce story was nothing more than an un-sourced Internet rumor that hadn’t been picked up by a single journalist, at least not until the Palin’s issued their Facebook denial:

OK, Sarah, listen to me. You ignored my very nice open letter, but this is important. You have to fire Meg Stapleton, or give her something easier to do. There are no “so-called journalists” reporting this rumor, but now, they’ll all get to report Stapleton’s denial on your behalf.

On top of blowing 2 high-profile appearances, chasing down salacious internet rumors should be the log that breaks the caribou’s back. Dump SarahPac.

And, you can add mangling the English language to Stapleton’s list of crimes.

So, instead of a stupid blog rumor that nobody was paying attention to, you’ve got a stupid blog rumor that everyone is paying attention to because you told them to. Not exactly smart public relations, Meg.

That said, I can hardly blame the Palin camp for wanting to get out in front of these rumors before they did make the mainstream press and I’ve got to question the integrity of those bloggers, such as the Firedoglake blogger I linked above, who chose to go with an unsourced story like this simply because it was about Sarah Palin.