Readers of Andrew Sullivan‘s Daily Dish know that, among other things, he and his team throw new material up at a blistering rate. According to Google Reader, Daily Dish averages 308 posts a week. Today, he’s briefly shutting the blog down for only the second time in ten years to do something most bloggers wouldn’t deign to do: read Sarah Palin‘s Going Rogue in its entirety.
From The Daily Dish:
[Palin] is a deeply disturbed person which makes this work of fiction and fact all the more challenging to read. And the fact that she is now the leader of the Republican party and a potential presidential candidate, makes this process of deconstruction an important civil responsibility. We take this seriously as we always have. We want to be fair to her, and to her family, and to the innocent people she has brought into the spotlight. And we are not reporters. We are merely analysts trying to make sense of evidence already in the public domain, evidence that points in all sorts of directions, only one of which can be true…
…And we have had the book for less than a day. We feel we owe it to you to get it right – or as right as we can – until we post or publish anything.
Palin recently called Sullivan out via Facebook for his Trig birtherism. Sullivan claims to have “simply asked” Palin to provide proof that she was really Trig’s biological mother, but he did also blog about it relentlessly for more than a year.
As Ben Smith points out, Sullivan is a hugely influential political blogger and may have had a large role in “creating the Obama narrative.” His embrace of a relatively fringy position is all the more important, then, for keeping it alive.
Sullivan’s dramatic proclamation opens him up to ridicule, and it’s highly unlikely that he’ll find a smoking gun. More likely, tomorrow he’ll turn out an AP-like fact check that picks at inaccuracies real and perceived.
Still, Sullivan and his crew deserve a little credit for pausing to actually read Going Rogue, which is something that many bloggers — and straight reporters — didn’t bother to do.
(h/t Wonkette)
Have a tip we should know? tips@mediaite.com
