‘Member this? The condescending NBC Nightly News report on Wassila? I didn’t put the whole transcript there – I left out several pieces, including this one:
“Nonetheless, the area grew, and so did government spending and the city’s debt. Palin was able to cut property taxes because the previous adminstration had increased the sales tax. Resident Anne Kilkenny has been both a registered Republican, Democrat, and a critic of Palin’s. ‘She cut taxes for the corporations, that’s for sure, but for the residents, because property taxes were replaced by sales taxes, the tax burden generally went up.'”
Now look at this – Ben Smith of Politico reports:
“I’ve received some 50 copies of a long e-mail from a woman named Anne Kilkenny of Wasilla, and it may be the most potent attack on Sarah Palin out there, bouncing around the Internet at the viral speed of an Obama-Muslim rumor.”
Then he prints the whole email. Isn’t it interesting that John Larson, the NBC reporter who did that patronizing report on Wassila, should look up and interview an Anne Kilkenny? Oh look, here she is in the NYT. Ms. Kilkenny has the right to be a Palin critic if she wants to be. What I am complaining about is two things: 1. Larson going out of his way to say Kilkenny was both a Republican and a Democrat, implying that that guarantees that she is not too strongly either; and 2. the way the segment quoted from the report was edited. It could have been cut this way:
Nonetheless, the area grew, and so did government spending and the city’s debt. Resident Anne Kilkenny has been both a registered Republican, Democrat, and a critic of Palin’s. ‘She cut taxes for the corporations, that’s for sure, but for the residents, because property taxes were replaced by sales taxes, the tax burden generally went up.’ The previous adminstration had increased the sales tax, so Palin tried to balance that out by cutting property taxes. [My edit, not quoting NBC]. But no, that would make it sound favorable to a Republican (she tried to keep the tax burden down), which would surely be grounds for instant firing at NBC.
