The Palin Precedent

If there’s one point your editor has pressed to reporters over the years it is that the gold coin of news gathering is the document. Try to get — never steal, but seek the legal provision of or legal access to — the document. It could be a first draft, handwritten notes, a staff memo, a tax-return, an interbank telex, a diplomatic cable, a letter, a brief, or an email. The idea is that the written document is more credible than the interview, the statistic, the tape recording, or the photograph. If one has a document, one can’t be accused of making up a quote or mischaracterizing a comment. It’s all there in black and white.

So far be it from us to complain about reporters seeking, or the state of Alaska providing, the 24,000 emails from Governor Palin’s tenure at Juneau. But holyflippingcow, as Mrs. Palin might exclaim, what is one to make of the fact that after two days poring over this trove of documents, the best that the press has been able to come up with is that she had a tanning bed installed in the governor’s mansion? The hunt for something to pin on Mrs. Palin seems to have descended into a kind of parody in which, if the joke is on anyone, it’s not Mrs. Palin.

The question is whether there is a precedent to be established. Are the other politicians going to release the emails from their times in public office? Do we get the emails from, say, President Obama’s four years at the Senate? Or, say, Timothy Pawlenty’s as governor of Minnesota or Timothy Geithner’s as president of New York’s Federal Reserve Bank? Or, for that matter, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s emails from when he was governor of California? And what about Mitt Romney of Massachusetts? Twenty-four-thousand pages of emails from each of them and the press would have its work cut out for it.

Now it may yet be that the press will find something scandalous in the emails from Mrs. Palin’s tenure at Juneau — other than the impression that she was a hands-on chief executive who paid attention to the details of both policy and her political persona. It may be that the precedent the press will pursue is that our public figures will have to make available not only their official emails but their private ones, as well, particularly if they used private mail for public business. Or it may be that the press will have to look for consolation in the old saying that God doesn’t deduct from a man’s allotted span the time he has spent fishing.