Pursuing Palin

James Taranto has a hilarious column on the harrowing situation in which the press finds itself as it scrambles to keep up with Sarah Palin. It seems the governor — who somehow lacks a sense of gratitude to the mainstream press — won’t tell the television networks where her next stop is. So the reporters are forced to race behind the Palin bus in an effort to avoid losing sight of her. Mr. Taranto quotes a piece in which a producer of CBS News, Ryan Corsaro, says: “I just hope to God that one of these young producers with a camera whose bosses are making them follow Sarah Palin as a potential Republican candidate don’t get in a car crash, because this is dangerous.”

Well, land sakes, let us put in a word for those “bosses.” They are thinking like they’re supposed to think. The template was set by Charles Chapin, who was city editor of the Evening World when the cowboy eloped with the ranch owner’s daughter. The story is told in the foreword to “City Editor,” the memoirs of Stanley Walker. Chapin, it notes, would later go to prison for murdering his wife, a crime that, we would like to think, can be attributed to character traits unrelated to the qualities he displayed as editor. Others may dispute the point.* In any event, it seems that Chapin sent a youngster out to find the cowhand and his new bride, and what followed will be recounted as long as there are newspapers.

The runaways “were traced to a shabby lodging house off Union Square,” reports the writer of the foreward to “City Editor,” and when the reporter “blandly intruded on their clandestine bliss the cowboy tossed him down stairs and added to that virile gesture of dismissal the convincing threat that if the reporter ever again tried poking his ink-stained nose into their private business” he would fill his backside with buckshot. The reporter is said to have “crawled” to the nearest telephone and “confessed” his defeat to Chapin. But the editor would have none of it. “Look here,” he said, “you go back and tell that bully — he can’t intimidate me.”

To those who wonder why the reporters are willing to weave in and out of high speed traffic to keep up with Mrs. Palin, that is the answer. They know that if they back off, some other network or newspaper will press on and finally land the interview with Mrs. Palin they are all seeking. She, we suspect, is the type to reward such derring. In any event, the newspapermanly thing to do is to stick with the chase, and the right thing for the editors to say is that they are not going to be intimidated by the danger of high speech chases on the interstate highways. The story of Mrs. Palin at the moment — it may not last forever, but all the more reason to stay with it — is that Americans can’t get enough of her.

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* In respect of the sensational crime, Andy Logan of the New Yorker remarked of Chapin: “They had known he would be involved in a murder some day, but had always assumed he would be the victim.”