ADN's Palin coverage - nothing but wildcat Palin and yellow editors in middle of road

Texas progressive pundit Jim Hightower's most famous book is probably "There's Nothing in the Middle of the Road but Yellow Stripes and Dead Armadillos," available at Amazon.

Well, the Anchorage Daily News has now found that out, per the title twist, this past week.

Per e-mails exchanged with Sarah Palin, and now posted by Editor Pat Dougherty on the ADN's editors' blog at the link above, it's clear the ADN's top editorial staff tried to "straddle" the middle of the road on coverage of Trig Palin's paternity and has been thoroughly flattened.

First, the ADN has confessed and admitted to what blogger Cajun Boy said the week before the Nov. 4 election - it DID have a reporter investigating the Trig rumors - Lisa Demer.

At the same time, the ADN took a mindset in advance of assigning Demer to the story that undercut its own work:

You may have been too busy with the campaign to notice, but the Daily News has, from the beginning, dismissed the conspiracy theories about Trig's birth as nonsense.

Just as it now dismisses theories about Bristol Palin's recent alleged first/second motherhood, of Tripp. And, that explains why Pat Dougherty and others won't answer my e-mails about the ADN's non-coverage of that issue, too.

Needless to say, Pat's getting a reaming in comments to this particular blog post. And deserves it.

Let's take a further look at WHY he deserves it.

He goes on to say this after posting the exchange of e-mails on the blog:

According to the “return receipt” feature of my email, my reply was opened shortly after I sent it on New Year’s Eve. Other than that, I have received no response or acknowledgement of that email.

And he acts half-surprised by this, even given this history of Palin's dealings with Derner:

Lisa Demer started reporting. She received very little cooperation in her efforts from the parties who, in my judgment, stood to benefit most from the story, namely you and your family. Even so, we reported the matter as thoroughly as we could. Several weeks ago, when we considered the information Lisa had gathered, we decided we didn't have enough of a story to accomplish what we had hoped. Lisa moved on to other topics and we haven't decided whether the idea is worth any further effort.

He says he's not sure what to do with Demer's reporting. Helloooo????

Hello, you tie in a sidebar about Tripp/Bristol, per your own comment about that in your email. You then give Sarah one last chance to cooperate.

If she doesn't, you run what you have and note the questions you asked her that she wouldn't answer. (Or that you asked Dr. Baldwin Johnson.)

What an effing maroon.

A number of the commenters on his blog post tell Dougherty this is why they, in essence, gave up on the ADN actually doing anything.

Meanwhile, the ever-whiney Palin (if you can't stand the heat, turn the gas up and stick your head in the oven, perhaps) ends HER e-mail with this:

As a public official, I expect criticism and I expect to be held accountable for how I govern . . . often the refusal of the media to correct obvious mistakes, unfortunately discredits too many in journalism today, making it difficult for many Americans to believe what they see in the media.

You need not worry about discrediting the media; people like Pat Dougherty are giving it plenty of self-inflicted discrediting.

E-mail him about this here.