Sarah Palin Loves Twitter
After vicious personal attacks against her and her family, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin is circumventing mainstream media and communicating directly with the public via the social networking site Twitter.
Like the scene from “Network,” the classic movie satire of network television news, Palin is essentially sticking her head out the window and yelling: “I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!”
Palin’s postings –”tweets” in Twitter lingo — have increased exponentially since she announced her resignation a week ago. AKGovSarahPalin has 48 tweets in the past week, at last count, and 92,276 followers.
Mainstream media’s notoriously liberal slant has long forced conservative politicians to seek alternative ways to communicate with voters. As a former press secretary for several Republican officials, I went around the mainstream sites — TV networks, The New York Times, The Washington Post — by using talk radio, local weekly newspapers, Fox News and The Washington Times.
Again, from the movie “Network,” which seems as true today as it was 33 years ago, Howard Beale, the network TV anchor, says: “Television is not the truth! Television is a God-damned amusement park! Television is a circus, a carnival, a traveling troupe of acrobats, storytellers, dancers, singers, jugglers, side-show freaks, lion tamers, and football players. We’re in the boredom-killing business! So if you want the truth . . . Go to God! Go to your gurus! Go to yourselves! Because that’s the only place you’re ever going to find any real truth.”
. . . or today, just go to Twitter! Now with the power of the new social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter, politicians can communicate directly with their supporters without intermediaries. It seems from her tweets, Palin is using both her computer and her BlackBerry to send updates to her followers.
Palin’s distaste for mainstream media coverage of her is clear from her tweets. Late Thursday night she tweeted: Anxious for Fairbanks radio visit tomorrow re: 2nd Amendment! We have rockin’ surprise guest. Candidly, I love radio vs some newspapers bc (Twitter limits posts to 140 characters, so she had to break this thought into a second post.) Most newspapermen by definition have to be liberal; if they’re not, by my definition, they can hardly be good newspapermen” W. Cronkite.
On Wednesday, her tweet quote was: Today, try this: “Act in accordance to your conscience -risk- by pursuing larger vision in opposition to popular, powerful pressure”-unknown.
Most of her postings are about her daily activities, which frankly, as a lower-48er, I can’t understand because of references to things like: Mat-Su/Kenai, orphaned moose calves, Kotzebue hub and Emmonak’s summer chum salmon fishery.
She also posts her opinions on national political issues: Talk in DC of a 2nd “Stimulus” Pkg: Impacts on AK? We’d be partaking in even more Big Govt largess & immoral natl debt accumulation. These political issue tweets, of course, just fuel speculation that she is resigning in order to run for president in 2012.
And Palin has found that Twitter is an effective tool to defend herself without editors or producers inserting a bias into her comments. Last Sunday, she tweeted that Critics are spinning, so hang in there as they feed false info on the right decision made as I enter last yr in office to not run again. Or, as the Beale character said in the movie, “This is not a psychotic breakdown; it’s a cleansing moment of clarity. ”
Palin’s opponents tried to diffuse her effectiveness in communicating via this new medium by setting up Twitter accounts that were mistakenly assumed by followers to be hers. (If you want to know if a public official’s Twitter account is the real one, look in the upper right hand corner of his or her page for the check mark with “verified account.”)
But, Palin quickly cleared up the confusion the day after her resignation announcement: Unfortunately fake “Gov Sarah Palin” twitter sites r doing their thing today: unscrupulous, untrue- so sorry if u recv false info @ fake site.
Follow Sarah Palin at: AKGovSarahPalin and Follow me at: EmilyMiller DC
Postscript: Read though the quotes from the Beale character in “Network” in 1976; it’s eerie how similar political and world issues were then and now, such as:
“‘I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore! ‘Then we’ll figure out what to do about the depression and the inflation and the oil crisis.”
“I don’t have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad. It’s a depression. Everybody’s out of work or scared of losing their job. The dollar buys a nickel’s worth, banks are going bust, shopkeepers keep a gun under the counter. Punks are running wild in the street and there’s nobody anywhere who seems to know what to do, and there’s no end to it. We know the air is unfit to breathe and our food is unfit to eat, and we sit watching our TVs while some local newscaster tells us that today we had 15 homicides and 63 violent crimes, as if that’s the way it’s supposed to be. We know things are bad — worse than bad.”
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