Fitness sensei and political nonentity Sarah Palin is not happy with the Associated Press, not happy at all. Really, she thinks the AP is full of “absolute jerks” who think snapping and posting a picture of Mitt Romney farting on schoolchildren is good journalism. Really, Associated Press jerkfaces — Mitt Romney’s gastrointestinal events are hardly appropriate journalistic fodder.
Speaking on pretty much the only cable network that will let Sarah Palin muse about the current political landscape (that would be Fox News, just in case someone thought it might be HGTV or something), Palin told Megyn Y-Not-a-Vowel Kelly that Mittens was just doing a good deed by agreeing to a photo-op with a bunch of, quite frankly, uninformed schoolchildren, but the AP had to go and turn this good deed into an infinitely captionable photo that will live a healthy, prosperous life on the internet long after Mitt Romney’s presidential candidacy dies. When Kelly asked whether Palin thought the AP photo is either “media bias or is it a forgivable mistake,” Palin said that not only was the photo biased, it was totally sexist, too.
Hell yeah, it’s media bias. And it’s also some sexism when you consider what the response to Mitt Romney’s photo is – which is degrading and Associated Press, they’re jerks for having run that, even with the caption. I mean, absolute jerks and biased to try and taint some people’s view of Mitt Romney by running this photo. It’s embarrassing.
Speaking of taint…
Palin, who knows something about awkward photojournalism from her days on the 2008 campaign trail, wasn’t finished by a longshot. She added (and brace yourself to grudgingly agree with Sarah Palin) that photos like this Mitt Romney snapshot prove that there’s an undercurrent of sexism running through the news media:
But when you consider people’s responses to what this picture is, I don’t remember a whole lot of people getting too wee wee-ed up about the photos that were run of me four years ago, including the young men that looked like they were looking up legs or up my skirt, even. Last night even on Bill O’Reilly, I saw that he did a piece on this segment, I don’t know if he did a piece on that when it happened to me or maybe some other women over the years, so I think that it’s still kind of still a tell-tale sign of some little bit of sexism in our society, that we really need to overcome so that we can all move forward.
Palin isn’t wrong about the sexism inherent in a photo like the one taken of her onstage, but the Romney photo is obviously a metaphor, or whatever, for Mitt Romney farting all over public education. At least, that’s the first thing some people who aren’t me immediately thought when they were indulging in their morning cereal and totally unprepared for a milk sneeze, but Palin might have been onto something when she told Kelly that “you’ve got to feel for that little girl,” who totally doesn’t deserve to be on the butt-end of any internet memes.
Palin calls the Associated Press ‘absolute jerks’ [Politico]