I swear, I try not to spend too much of my time berating the media, but what the hell do you do with this? Gary Trudeau’s ages-old political comic strip Doonesbury has managed to get the author of a new Palin biography to allow excerpts of the book to be “leaked” by Doonesbury’s reporter-in-residence, Roland Headley. The joke is: author McGinniss bought a house next to the Palins, so Headley bought a house next to him.
Its a very basic commentary on the media and the lengths it will go to follow Sarah Palin’s every move, right? No one could misunderstand that, right? Queue Yakkety Sax:
Chicago Tribune: This week’s “Doonesbury” strips don’t meet our standards of fairness | Poynter..
The paper says in an A2 note that “the subject matter does not meet our standards of fairness [because] the strips include excerpts from a book that is not yet on the market and therefore unavailable for review or verification by the Tribune.”
Um………………
Its a comic strip? I don’t think anyone expected it to be factual, though the sad part is: Doonesbury is often much more factual than the reportage of the stiffs who are blocking its publication. Instead of reading the strip and maybe giving some consideration to a feckless media’s constant and frankly creepy lust for more news of the single most irrelevant figure in modern politics, they pull the whole strip.
So, anyway.. Follow the whole story online, bypassing the ever-less-relevant print media altogether.