Suzi Parker’s bad day

In response to Suzi Parker Now Happily Dating Area Man:

Ace, you magnificent b**tard.  If I were Suzi Parker, I’d be taking a long vacation away from the Internet right about now.  And if I were a Washington Post editor, I’d be sending her on that long vacation by firing her.

The Sarah Jazeera affair is very unhelpful from the standpoint of vindicated conservatives doing little victory dances around another media-bias corpse, but it’s also an astounding failure of editorial oversight.  I don’t know how things work over at the WaPo, but I’ll assume Parker works in a similar environment to mine, and posts her own stuff.  It’s amazing that she wouldn’t notice the obviously goofy nature of the story she was posting… but even more remarkable that she didn’t think such a huge media story required editorial review, let alone cursory fact-checking.  

This wasn’t just a minor aside, a bit of extra info sprinkled atop a piece that stood on its own.  It wasn’t a minor error.  It was a critical flaw in the central premise of the piece, and its removal required the whole thing to be rewritten into a looser slam on Palin, which frankly makes almost no sense as it stands.  It wouldn’t pass muster at a minor lefty rant site.  The “news hook” for the rebuilt piece is that Parker had a chat with a Villanova poli-sci professor who thinks Palin shouldn’t have resigned from the governorship of Alaska if she wanted a further career in politics?  That’s some piping-hot insight right there! 

By the way, the Post must be feeling some big heat over the way they handled this debacle, because the disclaimer on the corrected Parker post has mutated again.  It now reads: “CORRECTION:  An earlier version of this post incorrectly reported that Sarah Palin had signed on as a contributor to the Al Jazeera America news network. The blogger cited a report on the Daily Currant Web site as the basis for that information without realizing that the piece was satirical.”  They’d better hope to the Lightworker that none of their readers bothers clicking over to the Daily Currant, to find themselves wondering how someone that didn’t realize it was a parody site could possibly work for a major news organization. 

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