Sarah Palin Wins Correction Of The Day After WaPo Runs Patently Unbelievable Al Jazeera Scoop
by Jason Linkins
Huffington Post
February 12, 2013
So, despite what you’ve heard, former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin is not going to be proselytizing from a perch at Al Jazeera English. This is something that The Washington Post briefly reported Tuesday, on its “She The People” blog, and it is 100 percent wrong. So now, the Post gets to run this fun correction:
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this post incorrectly reported that Sarah Palin planned to contribute to the Al Jazeera America news network.
Palin and Al Jazeera, eh? Well, that would sure be a weird fit, wouldn’t it, given their past intersections. Almost too impossible to believe? Well, the source for the Post’s story was this piece from a website called “The Daily Currant,” and if you can believe this, then you’ll believe anything:
After leaving Fox News, Palin said she was hoping to reach a broader audience with her message. When contacted by phone, Palin said Al Jazeera – with its extensive international network – offered her the best opportunity to broadcast to millions of people.
“As you all know, I”™m not a big fan of newspapers, journalists, news anchors and the liberal media in general,” Palin said. “But I met with the folks at Al-JaJizzraa (sic) and they told me they reach millions of devoutly religious people who don”™t watch CBS or CNN. That tells me they don”™t have a liberal bias.”
Uh-huh. There’s also this:
Although no longer involved directly with the network, Gore endorsed Palin’s career move as a sign of Al Jazeera’s commitment to fairness and balance.
“Al Jazeera provides high-quality, intelligent coverage of important issues,” Gore said. “And more importantly, it’s backed by oil money. That means when you get paid…you really get paid.”
And over on the sidebar you see a host of links to articles titled “George Bush Accidentally Votes For Obama” and “Bachmann: ‘We Must Ban Falafel’ in School Lunches” and “Ann Coulter Refuses to Board Airplane With Black Pilot.” If you can’t figure out this stuff is satire, after a cursory examination, then you should probably take a basic course on the history of English literature.
It’s too bad this wasn’t true, because other than the Al Jazeera stuff that formed the impetus to write this piece in the first place (the URL basename for the article still reads “sarah-palins-plan-to-reach-millions-of-devoutly-religious-people-through-al-jazeera”) there is not much else to talk about. Did you know Palin is on Facebook? She totally is. She also parlayed her political celebrity into brief stint, for herself and her family, as a reality teevee personalities, in case you haven’t heard.
“She had to be at least a bit giddy last month when actress Julianne Moore won a Golden Globe for her portrayal of Palin in the HBO miniseries ‘Game Change,'” writes the author Suzi Parker, ignorant of the fact that the obvious follow-up question is, “Really?”
Anyway, folks, feel free to go ahead and do even one thing to verify your gobsmackingly unbelievable scoops, I guess.