New York Times on the Palin "Ethics Investigation"

The New York Times has a story on the ethics investigation of Governor Sarah Palin. It is surprisingly factual and seeminly unbiased. The Times states:

An independent investigator appointed by a panel of state legislators earlier this month is looking into whether Ms. Palin dismissed a top law enforcement official in her administration because he failed to fire a state trooper, Mike Wooten, who went through a messy divorce with Ms. Palin’s sister.

Mr. Monegan told the Anchorage Daily News that Mr. Palin showed him some of the findings of a private investigator the family had hired and accused him of variety of misdeeds, including drunk driving and child abuse.

Mr. Palin told the newspaper he feared for his wife’s safety and said that Mr. Wooten had made threats against her and her family.

As part of efforts to demonstrate she welcomed the inquiry, Ms. Palin asked the state’s attorney general to look into the allegations as well.

Note that the article makes it clear that the Palin family feared Trooper Michael Wooten because he had threatened the family, and that Palin herself requested the ethics investigation.

Read it all at this link.

There's not much to this story that could be honestly used against Sarah Palin. She fired the public safety commissioner (Wooten's boss) in July and replaced him with a new commissioner. However, the new commissioner has not fired Michael Wooten who still has his job. If Wooten was the reason for the firing, then nothing much was accomplished by it.

Furthermore, as this article from the Anchorage Daily News points out, Palin was well within her purview to replace the commissioner and had non-Wooten related reasons for so doing.

There isn't much to the story, but that doesn't mean the Democrats won't capitalize on it and, as MSNBC is fond of doing, emphasize every news story about Palin with "Palin is under an ethics investigation." Such headlines immediately implant in the subconscious images of backroom deals, kickbacks and corruption, none of which applies to the actual facts.

As the unethical writer at Democratic Underground noted: "The modern laws of media hype and political warfare have a useful tenet: Repeat ANYTHING or raise false concern over ANYTHING and it is likely to be planted in the conscious/subconscious of many voters."

That, of course, is exactly what MSNBC and much of the mainstream media hope to accomplish.