My friend Sudeep is unwittingly in a public feud with Sarah Palin. In a Wall Street Journal blogpost, Sudeep wrote that her claim about grocery prices rising “significantly in the last year or so” was not supported by the facts. Palin used her Facebook page to fight back, rebuking Sudeep by citing another Wall Street Journal article to support her original inflation argument. Only, she selectively quoted the piece. She took out the part that said prices have been “tame” and clearly supported what Sudeep (and the facts) said. Doh.
We here at Hey Elise are Sudeep’s #1 fans, and as such, decided to aggregate today’s coverage in case the “prestigious” (Palin’s words, not mine) WSJ reporter ever comes out of his undisclosed location and wants to read about his day in the lamestream media spotlight.
So, Palin is hammering the Journal and Reddy for pointing out that she’s flat wrong about grocery prices going up significantly in the past year. What does she do? She quotes a separate Journal story that confirms what Reddy is saying—and cuts out that part with three dots. Nice! Palin has a journalism degree, so I’m guessing she knows what an ethical no-no it is to misquote somebody like that.
Of course she didn’t really read the article she cited to support her rebuke, because that article actually supported what the WSJ guy said in the first place. In conclusion, Sarah Palin, an illiterate person, is very entertaining.
Slate (in which John Dickerson attempts to post a defense of Sudeep on Palin’s FB page but it gets deleted)
At least she called you prestigious, Mr. Reddy! Palin seemed to have his number. But then I read Reddy’s critique and the story Palin says undermines it. The story Palin cites to support her claim doesn’t do that. In her speech, Palin said that “prices have risen significantly over the past year or so.” The Journal article says prices are only “beginning” to rise. The time period of “significant” increase Palin is talking about is referred to in the first sentence of the exculpatory article as “the tamest year of food pricing in nearly two decades.”
And I love this one, NY Magazine’s “Sarah Palin is in a fight with a Wall Street Journal Economics Reporter about Economics:”
Ouch. Reddy, dude, you don’t even read your own paper? Are you literate at all? Even a “former [half-term] governor and current housewife” knows more about economics than you, an alleged economics reporter. How pathetic for you. Maybe you should be the housewife and Palin should be the economics reporter.
Wait a second, though. As Reddy and the Columbia Journalism Review‘s Ryan Chittum notice, Palin used some ellipses to skip over a section of the Wall Street Journal passage she quotes. We wonder what she left out …
An inflationary tide is beginning to ripple through America’s supermarkets and restaurants, threatening to end the tamest year of food pricing in nearly two decades.
But that directly contradicts what Palin was arguing, and validates Reddy! When Palin realizes that she omitted this vital information, she is going to be so embarrassed for the first time ever.
Can’t wait to see what cable news will do with all this. A Mama Grizzly versus Lamestream Media fight could feed the cable newsies for weeks. (More at Huffington Post, The Raw Story, and too many other places to track.)