Palin Rumors: Smear or Gift?

The Sarah Palin story/ies blew up while I was on vacation, and it's so fascinating—from a media coverage angle as well as others—that I'll try to resist the urge to overpost. (By which I mean not just the pregnancy but her whole candidacy and rollout.) I may not be able to keep that promise, though.

But right now a quick hit on one topic: the role of blogs in the pregnancy rumors. Was it a legitimate story for the media? Aaron Barnhart at TV Barn says it was, and in the process makes the point:

And here's the other thing: How long was the Palin camp going to wait to tell us about Bristol's pregnancy? They only rushed the story to the media because of a hot rumor...

Well, hold up. Maybe they rushed it for that reason. Certainly that was the story: to combat scurrilous rumors about a pregnancy coverup, the Palin camp said it thus had to release the news of a real pregnancy.

But as Barnhart suggests, it's not as if they could have kept this under wraps until November anyway. Given that, when would you choose to spring the news? Maybe on a national holiday, while most news media were focused on a major hurricane? Might you pick that day to—and Palin's adviser Tucker Eskew said this, not me—"flush the toilet"?

It would just be nice if you could say that you were forced to flush by some reason other than a major hurricane on a national holiday, and blame someone else for making you do it...

I can't know what the McCain-Palin folks were actually thinking. But whether they were looking for an excuse to dump the news on Labor Day, or just happened to be given one, can you think of a better time to release the news? Should they be damning the scurrilous blogs or thanking them?