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Palin: Media goes easy on Kennedy

(Agencies)
Updated: 2009-01-09 09:22

Gov. Sarah Palin believes Caroline Kennedy is getting softer press treatment in her pursuit of the New York Senate seat than Palin did as the GOP vice presidential nominee because of Kennedy's social class.

Alaska Governor Sarah Palin answers questions from the media at the meeting of the National Governor's Association in 2008 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. [Agencies]

"I've been interested to see how Caroline Kennedy will be handled and if she will be handled with kid gloves or if she will be under such a microscope," Palin told conservative filmmaker John Ziegler during an interview Monday for his upcoming documentary film, "How Obama Got Elected." Excerpts from the interview were posted on YouTube Wednesday evening.

"It's going to be interesting to see how that plays out and I think that as we watch that we will perhaps be able to prove that there is a class issue here also that was such a factor in the scrutiny of my candidacy versus, say, the scrutiny of what her candidacy may be."

Palin said she remains subject to unfair press coverage of her and her family.

"Is it political? Is it sexism?" she asked. "What is it that drives someone to believe the worst and perpetuate the worst in terms of gossip and lies?"

She observed that Katie Couric and Tina Fey have been "capitalizing on" and "exploiting" her.

"I did see that Tina Fey was named entertainer of the year and Katie Couric's ratings have risen," she said. "And I know that a lot of people are capitalizing on, oh I don't know, perhaps some exploiting that was done via me, my family, my administration. That's a little bit perplexing, but it also says a great deal about our society."

The Alaska governor said that when she sees some of the coverage of her daughter Bristol especially "the momma grizzly rises up in me."

Looking back on the Couric interviews, Palin said she knew things were not going well after their first session and asked the McCain campaign to pull the plug on the remaining sit downs but insisted the campaign made her go through with the rest.

"I knew it didn't go well the first day, and then we gave her a couple of other segments after that. And my question to the campaign was, after it didn't go well the first day, why were we going to go back for more?" she said. "Because of however it works in that upper echelon of power brokering in the media and with spokespersons, it was told to me that, yeah, we are going to go back for more. And going back for more was not a wise decision either."

Palin criticized Couric for the way CBS "spliced it together," saying that "so many of the topics brought up were not portrayed as accurately as they could have, should have, been."

She also expressed frustration with Couric's characterization of her since the interviews. After being shown a clip of Couric complaining to David Letterman that no post-election interviewer has asked Palin why she would not tell the CBS anchor what newspapers she reads, the Alaska governor responded: "Because, Katie, you're not the center of everybody's universe."