The Story of One Little Composite Picture -- Sarah Palin and Demi Moore Reveal Their Pregnancies

Guest Post by Professor Brad Scharlott, Northern Kentucky University,

Department of Communication

As many of you know, Laura Novak, a fine journalist and soon-to-be novelist, has posted several written “conversations” with me over the last month or so, on a variety of topics stemming from my paper titled “Sarah Palin, the Press, and the Fake Pregnancy Rumor: Did a Spiral of Silence Shut Down the Story?” In these conversations, she asks me questions about my research, and then I ask her questions, since she, as a former high-level print and broadcast reporter, can represent the views of the press. Last Wednesday, she posted the fifth installment, in which we discussed questions relating to digital picture manipulation in general, plus this picture in particular:

Many of you are without doubt familiar with the picture; it shows Palin on March 14, 2008, nine days after she announced she was seven months pregnant, looking amazing un-pregnant. The point of the conversation was that, even though the picture above has been lightened and corrected for camera distortion, there is no reason to question the veracity of the key revelation of the picture, which was that her stomach was absolutely flat.

After Laura posted our conversation, I wondered if the key idea might be made even better using a comparison. So I googled “seven months pregnant” and found the famous Vanity Fair cover showing a nude but discreetly covered Demi Moore pregnant in her seventh month, which led me to create this graphic:

I sent this graphic to Gryphen at Immoral Minority, who posted it the next day, Thursday. (I also sent it here, and it gave Kathleen a big laugh.) I then emailed Andrew Sullivan about the graphic and the conversation, and he quickly linked to both under the simple headline “Sarah and Demi” and text that read “Compare and contrast. More here.” Since Sullivan has a zillion readers, many eyeballs viewed flat-belly “pregnant” Sarah for the first time plus read the conversation about the picture.

Yesterday, Laura placed the Sarah-Demi graphic in her blog, right above our conversation. Then the Business Insider news site picked up both.

Later the Wall Street Journal linked to the Business Insider article.

This morning I found the Business Insider story and graphic has been linked by One News Page, a global news aggregator. It would seem that the graphic is spreading like wildfire.

So how many new eyeballs have seen the graphic and learned about the pregnancy controversy? How many people worldwide read One News Page, and how many additional sites are going to link to it?

Significantly the point is that our collective efforts are bearing fruit.

This morning I turned in my grades, thus finishing my spring semester. I will teach a summer class, but that comes in June. So I have a lot of time right now to dream up graphics and articles and, who knows, maybe some billboards. Let’s all keep at it. Send me your ideas:

brad.scharlott@gmail.com

The media finally discovers Sarah Palin's "Trig pregnancy hoax" - The wall of silence is being torn down, and more voices are being heard

By Patrick

When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, an unbearable and at the same time seemingly unchangeable situation came to the end of its existence and caused a "shift" in reality. That's how I feel right now, although the Berlin Wall existed more than 28 years - and the "wall of silence" regarding Sarah Palin's faked pregnancy has only lasted about 2 1/2 years. As far as I am concerned, however, it went on for far too long. Together with a constantly growing group of researchers, readers and supporters, we have "lived" the exposure of Sarah Palin's shocking pregnancy hoax virtually every day - and it felt like constantly running up against a wall of ignorance and silence. This has now changed, it feels like a little revolution.

Prof. Brad Scharlott's paper tipped the balance. It might have very well been possible that some journalists were interested to write about Sarah Palin's pregnancy - but it was a taboo subject, almost nobody touched it, and writing about the pregnancy would have resulted in immediate ridicule and abuse. Well, there is still no shortage of ridicule and abuse, but more and more citizens and journalists seriously start to ask themselves: Can it be true? Is Sarah Palin really a fraudster of epic proportions, in addition to being a gifted demagogue and pinnacle of vindictiveness?

The world will soon find out.

The media coverage continues to grow virtually every hour, and our very own Leadfoot_LA contacted a large number of media outlets and was incredibly successful!

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READ THE LATEST DEVELOPMENTS AT POLITICALGATES:

"Shame.On.You. - Julia O'Malley and the Anchorage Daily News"

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Here is a selection of the many websites which have so far reported about Prof. Scharlott's paper (h/t to Leadfoot_LA):

http://www.alaskadispatch.com/article/journalism-professor-former-palin-flack-trying-kill-birth-hoax-discussion

http://www.businessinsider.com/sarah-palin-baby-hoax-2011-4
http://www.salon.com/news/politics/war_room/2011/04/12/scharlott_palin_trig/
http://gawker.com/#!5791915/did-sarah-palin-carry-out-the-biggest-hoax-in-american-political-history
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1376824/Teenage-stalker-Shawn-Christy-threatened-rape-Sarah-Palins-daughter.html#ixzz1JVN6N52o
http://www.metro.us/newyork/all%20usa%20cities/article/832686--sarah-palin-s-trig-hoax-liberals-have-a-birther-conspiracy-of-their-very-own
http://www.theblockradio.com/2011/04/41311/
http://www.politicususa.com/en/is-sarah-palin-finally-over
http://www.thefirstpost.co.uk/77752,people,news,sarah-palin-and-the-myth-she-is-trigs-mother-brad-scharlott-birther
http://www.feministe.us/blog/archives/2011/04/14/dear-everyone-please-stop-with-the-sarah-palin-pregnancy-hoax-rumors/
http://www.businessinsider.com/brad-scharlott-2011-4
http://politics.gather.com/viewArticle.action?articleId=281474979222622
http://www.newser.com/story/116379/trig-palin-birtherism-is-back-new-paper-alleges-sarah-palin-really-isnt-his-mom.html
http://moviecitynews.com/2011/04/the-return-of-the-trig-birthers/
http://andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com/2011/04/wimpy-and-gullible.html
http://thisisbrandx.com/2011/04/brand-x-files-catherine-zeta-jones-jennifer-lopez/

http://www.opposingviews.com/i/is-sarah-palin-really-trig-s-mom-hoax-theory-reemerges

http://newstalkcleveland.com/white-house/were/professor-says-sarah-palins-down-syndrome-baby-is-really-bristols/

There is also a big new discussion going on at Democratic Underground:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=439x889394

And there is much more to come.

Let me also mention again that our very own ProChoiceGrandma did a great job as a guest on the radio show of "TYTNow" co-host Tim Mihalsky (audio).

Prof. Brad Scharlott gave a very interesting interview to the journalist Laura Novak, which was also reprinted in "Business Insider."

He said:

Well the first reaction was pretty odd. Last week I sent a copy of my paper to Sarah Palin’s former press secretary asking if he had any comments, since he is mentioned in an unflattering way. He went ballistic. He called me a “scumbag” who is “in the service of evil.” He said he would slap me if he ever saw me, and that in a former age he would have challenged me to a duel. And then, under the heading “Brad Scharlott disgraces your university” he sent that critique of me in an email to all my colleagues in my department. I’m guessing he was used to using strong-arm tactics like that in Alaska. I guess he didn’t realize that 1) I am a tenured professor who can research anything I want, and 2) no one in Kentucky gives a shit about what he thinks.

And then something happened he didn’t count on. The student newspaper at my university learned what he did. So they interviewed me about his toxic rant and effort to embarrass me, and then they called him and got his view (he called for me to be fired), and then they posted a story about the matter in the online version of the student paper. And I thought, “What a golden opportunity!” So I asked the student newspaper editors if they wanted to post my paper online next to the story – and of course they did. And then it started spreading like wildfire. Exactly the opposite thing that Bill McAllister would have wanted.

As for reactions from journalists, a writer at Salon.com took note of the paper in a negative way yesterday, suggesting my university should be embarrassed that I wrote it – but give the writer his due, he posted my paper for reading or downloading so readers could maker up their own minds. His article prompted Andrew Sullivan of Newsweek/Daily Beast to essentially defend the appropriateness of my research – and to make the observation that the Salon writer was basically providing evidence in support of my thesis about a “spiral of silence.”

So those are the heaviest of the heavyweights to weigh in on my paper. There are blog sites devoted to revealing the truth concerning Trig’s birth, such as ImmoralMinority.com and Politicalgates.blogspot.com, and folks there have treated me like a rock star. I’ve had dozens of emails and phone calls from people basically saying, “Thank God you’re doing this.”

Thank you, Brad! We are all very, very glad that you have taken the initiative, put your reputation on the line and pushed "Babygate" into the mainstream!

Andrew Sullivan today published some hard-hitting comments as well:

There was a strange collective decision not to know - and to stigmatize those who simply wanted to get the question resolved. And we still don't know. Now that Palin herself has joined the Birther nonsense, would it be too much to ask for former half-term governor Palin to provide some medical records - as she promised? (...)

But there really is no comparison. We have gotten all the data one can want out of the Obama administration on his birth certificate. He has delivered it. Palin has delivered nothing ... but a fantastical, un-fact-checked manuscript, bald-faced lies, and a campaign of media intimidation. Which worked.

So what is left to say right now? Events are moving very fast - and Sarah Palin's silence is deafening. The only weapon she and her fanatical fans have are ridicule, smears and diversions ("you are attacking Trig") - but that won't be enough, as the cat is out of the bag.

The truth is simple, it's in front of all our eyes, yet only few people wanted to believe it - and many still don't.

Just look at the "newborn" Trig on April 18, 2008. The most important document in this respect is the article which was published on the website of the Alaskan TV-station KTUU on April 18, 2008, and contained pictures of Trig which were taken only several hours after the official birth. Trig looks neither premature (born at "7 1/2 months", as Sarah Palin now persistently claims, contradicting earlier information) nor like a newborn baby. Because he wasn't. He was born much earlier, and if Sarah Palin hoped that the media wouldn't seriously discuss the faked pregnancy because the "maths doesn't add up", she was definitely not successful.

Yes, it is in fact very well possible that Bristol Palin is the biological mother of Trig as well as Tripp. Some people from Alaska told us that this is the case, but the final proof is still missing. I suggest that somebody ask Bristol herself - there will be either "deafening silence" or some fascinating answers, but probably not much in between.

Apart from that, it would take Sarah only about one day to prove that she is Trig's biological mother. Which she never will, because she can't.

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Click HERE to read all posts at Politicalgates about Sarah Palin's faked pregnancy.

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UPDATE:

Leadfoot chimes in with some important observations:

I want to chime in and give the perspective of a PR person. Think about this -- how much has Sarah been in the news lately? We've all noticed a decline, right? Well, if you do a google news search today, 249 new stories come up about Sarah. The ones we have listed in this post are OUR story. The other 225 or so are about a stalker threatening to rape Willow and Sarah visiting Wisconsin. BOTH of those stories were from statements put out by SARAH HERSELF, TODAY. Why? The stalker story happened more than a week ago. It sounds like she just decided today to visit Wisconsin and make her big announcement. Why? Well, of course we all know the answer -- to deflect.

She generated 225 stories today.
We generated 25.

If I were HER PR person, I would have done EXACTLY the same thing. Get more google links out there -- content, content, content. Bury the "bad stories." It's all about content generation and managing the search crawlers in this day and age of news spreading.

What does this tell me, as a PR professional? Sarah is scared. VERY, VERY afraid. Her team worked their BUTTS off today to generate news.

So our work here is not done. We need to keep emailing reporters, keep tweeting, keep working. Sarah put her 2 announcements over the news wires (that costs about $1200 each) and reached 2500 media outlets at once. We just contact people, unpaid, one at a time.

But are WE scared? Nope. Our story is far more interesting. :)

"Babygate", Sarah Palin's faked pregnancy - Finally, the floodgates have opened, the fraudster Sarah Palin is about to be unmasked

By Patrick

Tim Mihalsky from "The Block" and regular on "The Young Turks" just tweeted:





Do you remember the days when the faked pregnancy was a taboo subject...?

They are gone.

Taboo subjects are sooooo last week.

Salon started today with an incoherent, badly researched article about Prof. Brad Scharlott's paper, but I was still very happy that they picked up the subject in the first place, and I am grateful that Salon linked to Prof. Scharlott's paper. For anyone who wants to push Sarah Palin's pregnancy fraud into the mainstream, there is no such thing as "bad publicity." The obvious reason for this is that there are many people who are just waiting for the right opportunity, for the moment when the "ice will be broken", in order to "go on the record" and report about Sarah Palin's pregnancy - just like Tim Mihalsky. And there will be others as well, this is only the beginning.

Andrew Sullivan and the bloggers will be "victorious" in the end. Finally, after more than two long years, the media has woken up.

Andrew Sullivan slammed the "Salon" article and wrote:

From the very get-go, I have wanted simply to get this out of the way and have deliberately kept my inquiry narrowly focused on the obligation of a public figure to provide evidence to back up politically loaded biographical claims. The birth of Trig was critical to appealing to a pro-life base, and was used as a political argument and weapon in the 2008 campaign and since. It cannot surely be "embarrassing" for the media to ask for evidentiary proof - any more than it was inappropriate for Obama to produce proof of his birth in Hawaii. It may be awkward, but it isn't illegitimate. If someone asked for evidence of a candidate's, say, war record, no one would bat an eyelid. And when the claims are made by someone obviously delusional and deceptive about a whole number of matters, the press should feel no qualms at all. And yet they uniformly took Elliott's position that this kind of inquiry is beneath them. Look: you're the press. Nothing is beneath you.

Elliott does not criticize the paper; he offers no thoughts on the specifics; he has no opinion on the media's role. He just asserts that this is an absurd request, even though Palin is actually on record saying she has already released a birth certificate for Trig (which she hasn't).

And so Elliott, far from rebutting the theory of press laziness and incuriosity in the paper, actually adds one more tidbit of confirmation.

Very true! Still, as I said, I am very happy that they picked up the subject of the pregnancy and Brad Scharlott's paper in the first place.

Some liberal journalists already understand that the Trig issue has nothing to do at all with the "Obama birthers", and that it's not an issue to be ridiculed, but one of huge importance. Sarah Palin is arguably the biggest political fraudster in America in living memory, and this fact served as a huge obstacle for us investigative anti-Palin bloggers right from the start, because Sarah Palin's actions apparently were simply too outrageous to be believed by many.

Many people certainly had a very hard time with the question: Is it possible that a female Governor faked a pregnancy in order to avoid public embarassment, and then used the baby as a political prop in order to drum up support?

That's exactly what Sarah Palin did. Liberals, independents and right-wingers should get used to it - and fast.

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Click HERE to read all posts at Politicalgates about Sarah Palin's faked pregnancy.

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Please re-tweet:

https://twitter.com/#!/politicalgates/status/57928623222558720

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UPDATE:

I think this is the link we all need to listen to the broadcast.

http://www.925kyhy.com/

UPDATE:

On the whole this was a flat and rather lack lustre event. It is clear that not one of the three reporters had a good handle on the evidence either for or against the suggestion that Palin faked her pregnancy.

However, one thing is clear, the question that Palin did so is being discussed behind the scenes. Tina Dupuy says at the beginning of part 2 " There's a lot of people who I find to be credible and intelligent people who are interested in this case...and the people who are interested in (it) I almost find more compelling than the evidence or lack there of."

Perhaps those "credible and intelligent people" should discuss the issue less behind the scenes and more in public.

Part 1

Part 2

Sarah Palin's faked pregnancy hits the mainstream - Alaska Dispatch publishes article by Prof. Brad Scharlott and also new response by Bill McAllister

By Patrick

Brad Scharlott, associate professor for journalism at Northern Kentucky University, continues to make his voice heard - this time in the mainstream, and, appropriately, in Alaska. The "Alaska Dispatch", whose reporters made national headlines last year due to their highly effective reporting regarding Joe Miller, have published a comment by Prof. Scharlott, who raised serious doubts about Sarah Palin's pregnancy with Trig in a bombshell research paper which entered the public domain yesterday.

In todays article for the "Alaska Dispatch", Prof. Scharlott explains the background of his research paper (download the paper HERE), and he also talks about the furious reaction of Sarah Palin's former spokesperson Bill McAllister which was delivered in an email dated April 5, 2011. Bill McAllister had received a copy of the research paper by Prof. Scharlott in advance, and in his immediate response McAllister clearly "lost it", for example accusing Scharlott of being "in the service of evil", announcing: "If we ever meet, I'll slap you."

One of the most important aspects of these recent events is that the "faked pregnancy rumors" are now finally hitting the mainstream, thanks to Prof. Scharlott's initiative (and also thanks to the bizarre reaction of Bill McAllister). It seems more and more likely that it will now be possible to discuss Sarah Palin's pregnancy with Trig openly, that the idea that the pregnancy was faked will not be treated as a "taboo subject" in the media any more.

Prof. Scharlott writes in the article on Alaska Dispatch:

By contrast, the idea that Palin may have staged a hoax concerning the birth of Trig has essentially become taboo in mainstream media, with only a few stories in the Anchorage Daily News treating the question in a serious way.

Eric Boehlert summarized the situation nicely last July when he wrote in Media Matters for America that “back in 2008, 99 percent of people in ‘the media’ did the right thing and ignored the Trig nonsense.” And Newspaper Index shows the same has been true since then.

Why the enormous difference in rumor coverage? In my paper, I suggest that the “spiral of silence” phenomenon came into play with the hoax rumor about Palin but not the one about Obama.

In a nutshell, a spiral of silence takes place when people perceive an idea they hold is outside of what most people seem to think and therefore censor themselves, to avoid disapproval or ridicule. And the more such people censor themselves, the more outside the mainstream the minority idea becomes, until the idea is virtually extinguished from the mainstream, at least as represented in the mass media.

A spiral of silence would seem to explain the virtual taboo in mainstream U.S. media relating to the Trig hoax rumor – even though many Americans privately question Palin's birth story. Prominent British author Christopher Hitchens, writing from Washington, D.C, last year, observed in the Spectator, a British publication: “An astonishing number of well-informed people tell me that Sarah Palin is not in fact the mother of baby Trig, but that she is ‘covering up’ for another family member whose child he really is.”

By contrast, various factors – such as the aggressiveness of “truthers” and the helpfulness of conservative politicians in, say, proposing legislation relating to birth certificates – have kept the Obama rumor front and center in the nation’s media.

To make the case in my paper that the media should have paid more attention to the Trig hoax rumor, I pointed out that when the rumor first appeared in nationally prominent blog sites Palin offered no documentary evidence, such as a birth certificate, to prove her maternity.

Instead, she revealed to the world that Bristol was then pregnant, which was supposed to prove that Sarah must be Trig’s mother, given when Trig was reportedly born. But of course, if there had been a hoax, then Trig’s actual birth date is unknown.

So how could it have happened that the long-existing "rumors" that Sarah Palin faked a pregnancy were treated as a taboo-subject in the first place anyway? Prof. Scharlott examines this and other questions in great detail in his research paper, which he titled "Palin, the Press, and the Fake Pregnancy Rumor: Did a Spiral of Silence Shut Down the Story?"

I predict that it will not be long before only a few people will be able to remember that the subject of Palin's faked pregnancy was once a "taboo" subject that virtually every journalist desperately tried to avoid. So far, it has been the task of bloggers to keep the public informed and to investigate the details of the pregnancy. But once the floodgates open this will quickly change and it will become a much discussed topic.

Once the subject is in the mainstream, Sarah Palin will have a hard time continuing with her now well-known "stonewalling" approach: Refusing to show concrete evidence and continuing to play the victim of the evil liberal media.

It's also very appropriate that it's an Alaskan publication which takes the "first step" in the mainstream, because the pregnancy issue originates from Alaska, and it should be resolved there.

The truth is that Sarah Palin is unable to present evidence for her pregnancy, for the simple reason that it did not happen - and many Alaskans know it, and it is my view that a number of Alaskans are also implicated in this scandal and have assisted her to execute the "hoax."

Now we also have a "second story": The mentally-unbalanced reaction in an email by Bill McAllister to Prof. Scharlott - and his subsequent vicious attempt to damage Prof. Scharlott's reputation by sending his email to several of Scharlott's colleagues at Northern Kentucky University. Apparently Bill McAllister still believes that he has "power" and can destroy careers. He couldn't be more wrong.

This is Bill McAllisters full email to Prof. Scharlott again:

On Apr 5, 2011, at 2:57 PM, xxxxxxxxxxxx@alaska.xxx wrote:
If we ever meet, I'll slap you. In a different era, I'd challenge you to a duel.
Be advised: I am at home on my own computer. This is my final week at
the Alaska Department of Law. Nothing I have to say here is said on
behalf of the state, the attorney general or Sarah Palin, whom I have
not seen or heard from since she resigned.
The italicized word "coincidentally" in the following sentence makes
you a scoundrel:
"In the first photo, Palin is shown standing to the left of KTUU-TV
newsman Bill McAllister, who coincidentally would become her director
of communications in July. (The other person is KTVA-TV cameraman Dan
Carpenter.)"
So let's parse this. I was a journalist for 30 years. I took down a
conservative Republican congressman, Arlan Stangeland (7th District,
Minnesota), in 1990, because he used his House credit card to bill
phone calls to and from the home of his mistress. (Johnny Apple of the
New York Times followed up on the story.) In 1980, I took down the
police chief of Winona, Minnesota, over a variety of ethical lapses,
including the doctoring of a police report on an alleged sexual
assault by his son. I have won national, regional and state awards for
my reporting in both Alaska and Minnesota for television, radio and
newspapers. I co-chaired the annual conference of Capitolbeat, the
Association of Capitol Reporters and Editors, in Seattle in 2005. I
was elected four times (the most ever) as the president of the Alaska
Capital Correspondents Association.
And I threw it all away to hide Sarah Palin's pregnancy hoax?
You are despicable.
I wasn't there when Palin was impregnated nor when she gave birth, so
I have no eyewitness accounts to offer. I can tell you that I never
even heard of the fake pregnancy rumor until the VP selection. Let me
repeat that: As the most connected politics reporter in the state for
years, I NEVER EVEN HEARD OF IT!!!!
Your suggestion that I was bought off to perpetuate a scam on the
American people is reprehensible. Be sure -- and be glad -- that we
will never meet. I have far more honor than you, scumbag. I have lived
an imperfect but honest life. You are in the service of evil.

Prof. Scharlott has commented on McAllister's email in an article at the Alaska Dispatch. The Dispatch have also given McAllister a chance to respond and published his op-ed together with Prof Scharlott's article. That seems fair enough. However, the gist of his reply is that he, McAllister, will continue to resort to insults of a nasty and derogatory manner whilst defending himself, a cancer survivor, against any insinuations (real or imagined) that he is a liar.

Bill McAllister today writes in the Alaska Dispatch:

Associate professor Scharlott -- whose name aptly combines “charlatan” and “harlot,” both phonetically and symbolically -- compares himself to an investigative reporter but demonstrates none of the tenets of responsible journalism.

For example, he “buried the lead.” You have to read several paragraphs into his diatribe before you discover that the reason for my response to him was not the seemingly ludicrous premise of his “paper” -- that Trig Palin is not really his mother’s child -- but his cavalier attempt to draw me into a controversy that doesn’t concern me except in the most tangential way.

On Saturday morning, Sept. 12, 2009, I narrowly escaped death due to complications from a cancer that had been diagnosed 11 months previously. I have an incurable condition that, thankfully, is at the moment under control. But I do not know if I will get to live a normal lifespan for an American man of my generation.

It is in this context that I have adopted a “zero tolerance” policy for lies about my character. The charlatan associate professor suggests that I should have responded to his completely unsubstantiated innuendo with some helpful comment or diplomatic riposte.

No chance. At this stage of life, I’m not going to sit still when anyone alleges that I was part of an unprecedented hoax perpetrated on the American people. That’s calling me a liar. That’s calling me a conspirator. That basically says that a record of 30 years of quality journalism should be chucked into the trash because of a fleeting association with Sarah Palin.

The harlot takes at face value and very seriously my comments about slapping and a duel. That’s fine. I just think it would be incumbent upon him, then, to take every other part of my email just as seriously: That he has no reason and no proof to cast aspersions on me in regard to the Trig controversy. That to treat me as collateral damage for his ideologically inspired slash-and-burn campaign against Sarah Palin is immoral.

In classic Palin-style, McAllister plays the victim and answers not one of the many factual questions which Prof. Scharlott raises in his research paper and his article. Instead, he resorts to ugly name-calling, also one of Sarah Palin's preferred tactics (who learned from who here?) and he suggests that anyone questioning Palin's pregnancy should automatically treated as a liar.

McAllister also glosses over the fact that there would be no controversy at all without the persistent refusal of Sarah Palin to present evidence for her pregnancy - which would also give her the chance to claim a major victory over these pesky bloggers like us and other critics in the mainstream like Prof. Scharlott.

Clearly McAllister hasn't spoken to Frank Bailey recently. Might I suggest to McAllister that a telephone call to Bailey may refresh his memory somewhat. The available evidence (Sarah Palin's emails and news reports from 2008) strongly suggests that Bill McAllister must have known about the faked-pregnancy allegations, as we explained in detail in our previous post about the subject.

It is proven through the available evidence that Bill McAllister knew about the allegation in March/April 2008 that Bristol was pregnant (before she could have been pregnant with Tripp). Sarah Palin herself explained in an email from April 1, 2008, which is included in the leaked manuscript of "Blind Allegiance to Sarah Palin" that this rumor is directly connected to the faked-pregnancy rumor when Palin wrote:

"Todd: Don't tell (Bristol) but rumor around the capitol is that she's pregnant. People are so mean. I'm going to nicely pull McAllister (KTUU political reporter and soon to be Palin spokesperson) aside and tell him that's not true."
Funny people maybe speculated I'm not really pg, but she is and I'm taking the heat for her! Funny, but pathetic.

Not only did Palin's email imply that she had the power to use McAllister in his role as a journalist, she also suggested that he could put an end to the rumours regarding both herself and Bristol. From the reports in the ADN we know that Sarah Palin then did exactly what she announced in the email and talked to Bill McAllister about the allegations that Bristol is pregnant.

In addition, other journalists were well aware of the faked pregnancy allegations. For example, Michael Carey from the Anchorage Daily News stated on the record on September 2, 2008 that he had heard the rumor that Sarah Palin faked her pregnancy long before the nomination, that it was discussed in the newsroom of the ADN and that one of his friends, a "smart lawyer", claimed that it's the "absolute truth" that Sarah Palin faked her pregnancy.

This rumor should have been very, very difficult to miss for anyone whom claims to have been "the most connected politics reporter" in Alaska at that time.

Professor Scharlott further writes in the article at the Alaska Dispatch:

Indeed, during the previous spring, reporters for the Anchorage Daily News variously wrote that Palin “simply does not look pregnant” (at seven months) and that she “did not get big with this pregnancy” (after she reportedly gave birth). Published pictures from the spring support the reporters' observations.

One of those two mystery photos, taken on April 13, shows Palin being interviewed by a TV reporter. The other picture shows her standing next to TV newsman Bill McAllister, who, I wrote in my paper, “coincidentally would become her director of communications three months later.” (In early April, a Daily News columnist wrote that McAllister was preparing to leave KTUU, and bloggers later wondered if he had been negotiating a job with the Palin administration while still covering it.)

The fact that I italicized “coincidentally” is what sparked McAllister’s seeming outrage.

He wrote: “The italicized word ‘coincidentally’ … makes you a scoundrel …”

And he continued: “I can tell you that I never even heard of the fake pregnancy rumor until the VP selection. Let me repeat that: As the most connected politics reporter in the state for years, I NEVER EVEN HEARD OF IT!!!!”

However, on August 31, the day McCain selected Palin, Anchorage Daily News reporter Kyle Hopkins wrote that the fake pregnancy rumor was “long simmering in Alaska.”

Prof. Scharlott comments in the article and his research paper about the "famous" two pictures which were uploaded as the only pictures ever on August 31, 2008 to the anonymous "erik99559" youtube account.

This flickr-account was quietly deleted in spring 2009, but I had taken screenshots before it was deleted (click on pictures to enlarge):







In his response at the Alaska Dispatch, Bill McAllister doesn't answer any of the questions which still surround these pictures - for example who took them.

In an interview with right-wing Alaskan radio talk-show Eddie Burke from January 9, 2009, Bill McAllister, back then still Sarah Palin's spokesperson, talked about the fake pregnancy allegations and tried to explain why Sarah Palin doesn't need to provide any evidence for her pregnancy. The interview is very enlightening also because McAllister describes in some detail how the reporters from the Anchorage Daily News tried to investigate the fake pregnancy allegations at the end of 2008 - which resulted in the famous "story that never appeared." Well, I guess the ADN-reporters might get a "second shot" now!

Watch:

(h/t: HopeforAmerica)

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Click HERE to read all posts at Politicalgates about Sarah Palin's faked pregnancy.

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As the events move very fast this weekend, please don't miss our post about Sarah Palin properly outing herself as an Obama-birther and falsely claiming that President Obama spent two million dollars in order to hide his birth certificate.

Sarah Palin thinks it's ok for "We the People" to demand to see President Obama's birth certificate (which Obama has provided!). Therefore "We the People" demand to see Trig's birth certificate!

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Please address any email messages to Prof. Brad Scharlott to his personal email account, and not his university email account.

His personal email:

brad.scharlott (at) gmail.com

Download Professor Brad Scharlott's bombshell research paper about Sarah Palin's fake pregnancy hoax and the role of the media!

By Patrick

Finally - the code of silence has been broken! For more than two years the media desperately tried to ignore the obvious, the fact that Sarah Palin is not the biological mother of Trig Paxson Van Palin and faked her pregnancy. This story turned into one of the best kept secrets in America, a taboo subject, something not to be mentioned in public, considered "nonsense" for example by far too many liberal journalists out of pure wishful thinking. It was so secret that famous author Christopher Hitchens once wrote with deep surprise in the UK "Spectator":

"An astonishing number of well-informed people tell me that Sarah Palin is not in fact the mother of baby Trig, but that she is ‘covering up’ for another family member whose child he really is."

Now Bradford Scharlott, Associate Professor for Journalism at Northern Kentucky University, who has been teaching at the university since 1991, finally decided to take matters into his own hands, and wrote a very well researched and brilliantly executed research paper about the faked pregnancy. The paper is not only a collection of damning facts, but also a stunning indictment of the media.

If the media continues to ignore the subject, they do so at their own peril. Already the question has to be asked how it was that the obviously faked pregnancy by Sarah Palin was never seriously discussed in the US media when the story first emerged in public at the end of August 2008.

Brad Scharlott writes at the beginning of his paper:

But it’s fair to ask if the U.S. press should have treated the fake pregnancy rumor as untouchable, both in 2008 and up to the present day. After all, if there seemed to be any real chance that the rumor was true, that might mean that a candidate for the vice presidency had staged a hoax about the birth of a Down syndrome child and then used that birth to promote her political career. This article looks at what American journalists knew, and when they knew it, concerning the fake birth rumor – and it finds there was insufficient evidence for the press to conclude that Palin was telling the truth about Trig. The article then looks at what factors may have caused the press to give Palin more deference than she was due, and how journalists might have reacted differently. Finally, the article considers how the spiral of silence theory casts light on press performance relative to the Trig hoax rumor and, relatedly, the Obama fake birth-certificate rumor.

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DOWNLOAD BRAD SCHARLOTT'S RESEARCH PAPER HERE!

ALTERNATIVE DOWNLOAD LINK - CLICK HERE!

Prof. Scharlott would like to stress that this paper is not the final version - it's a preliminary version, a work in progress, and there will probably be additions in the future.

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Moreover, we already have "a story in the story" as well! As we reported earlier today, Brad Scharlott made his paper available to several people in advance - including Sarah Palin's former spokesperson Bill McAllister.

Brad Scharlott didn't expect that Bill McAllister's reaction would be an outburst of hate on part of McAllister - the student's newspaper "The Northener" reported earlier today:

After sending his research to McAllister, Scharlott said he was not expecting what came next.

“If we ever meet, I’ll slap you,” McAllister wrote in an email to Scharlott on April 5. “In a different era, I’d challenge you to a duel.”

McAlliser’s email continued, calling Scharlott a “scoundrel” and “despicable.” He then forwarded his response to Scharlott to five other members of the Communications Department, with the subject line “Brad Scharlott disgraces your university.”

“He should be fired, frankly,” McAllister said. “I can’t believe [the] university is going to let some idiot present a paper [like this.]”

McAllister is quick to point out, both in his emails and over the phone, that he is, in no way, speaking on behalf of the Alaska Department of Law, but as “someone who is demeaned and lied about in this paper.” Emails obtained by The Northerner were sent to and from his personal email account, and he said he spoke to reporters on his lunch break.

“I had never even heard a rumor [about this] until she was chosen by McCain, then that weekend all kinds of shit came out that no one had heard before,” McAllister said. “[Scharlott’s research] defames me and I’m just not having it.”

McAllister said that after he sent the emails to other members of NKU’s communication department, Scharlott responded to him again, this time telling McAllister that he “made a deal with the devil.”

“That blows any pretense that he’s objective or fair,” McAllister said. “It proves it is not academic rigor but vitriol.”

McAllister said he found many factual errors in the paper when he read it, such as incorrect call letters to TV stations, and facts taken out of context.

“He doesn’t come out and say it, but he is implying there is some link between the story about Trig [Paxton Van Palin] and my being hired by her,” McAllister said. “The two things have nothing to do with her. She hired me because I was the best known politics reporter in the state of Alaska.”

McAllister said he denied the charges on behalf of Palin because he was her spokesman, not because he had any role in a pregnancy hoax. He said the only part he played during Palin’s pregnancy was that of a reporter.

“Aside from interviewing her in her office when she came back to work, I had nothing to do with it,” McAllister said. “I had nothing to do with her personal life.”

Interestingly, it was Bill McAllister himself who chose to make his response to Brad Scharlott public, by sending it to Scharlott's colleagues in the communications department, in an attempt to damage Scharlott's reputation.

Therefore it's only fair to publish Bill McAllister's email in the full version - it's a memorable document:

On Apr 5, 2011, at 2:57 PM, xxxxxxxxxxxx@alaska.xxx wrote:
If we ever meet, I'll slap you. In a different era, I'd challenge you to a duel.
Be advised: I am at home on my own computer. This is my final week at
the Alaska Department of Law. Nothing I have to say here is said on
behalf of the state, the attorney general or Sarah Palin, whom I have
not seen or heard from since she resigned.
The italicized word "coincidentally" in the following sentence makes
you a scoundrel:
"In the first photo, Palin is shown standing to the left of KTUU-TV
newsman Bill McAllister, who coincidentally would become her director
of communications in July. (The other person is KTVA-TV cameraman Dan
Carpenter.)"
So let's parse this. I was a journalist for 30 years. I took down a
conservative Republican congressman, Arlan Stangeland (7th District,
Minnesota), in 1990, because he used his House credit card to bill
phone calls to and from the home of his mistress. (Johnny Apple of the
New York Times followed up on the story.) In 1980, I took down the
police chief of Winona, Minnesota, over a variety of ethical lapses,
including the doctoring of a police report on an alleged sexual
assault by his son. I have won national, regional and state awards for
my reporting in both Alaska and Minnesota for television, radio and
newspapers. I co-chaired the annual conference of Capitolbeat, the
Association of Capitol Reporters and Editors, in Seattle in 2005. I
was elected four times (the most ever) as the president of the Alaska
Capital Correspondents Association.
And I threw it all away to hide Sarah Palin's pregnancy hoax?
You are despicable.
I wasn't there when Palin was impregnated nor when she gave birth, so
I have no eyewitness accounts to offer. I can tell you that I never
even heard of the fake pregnancy rumor until the VP selection. Let me
repeat that: As the most connected politics reporter in the state for
years, I NEVER EVEN HEARD OF IT!!!!
Your suggestion that I was bought off to perpetuate a scam on the
American people is reprehensible. Be sure -- and be glad -- that we
will never meet. I have far more honor than you, scumbag. I have lived
an imperfect but honest life. You are in the service of evil.

Brad Scharlott, in the" service of evil?"

Bill McAllister will make C4P proud.

However, the available documentation suggests one thing: That Bill McAllister is a liar.

After Frank Bailey's new book "Blind Allegiance to Sarah Palin" was leaked, it quickly became apparent that it contained incredibly interesting information (click to read details) about the frantic attempts of Sarah Palin in March and April 2008 to suppress the fake pregnancy rumors.

Excerpt from the book:

Of course, placid waters did not last long. Two issues immediately became irksome.

Because she did not look pregnant, speculation arose that Sarah was not actually carrying a child at all. More annoying was the allegation that she was hiding daughter Bristol‘s pregnancy. Those of us who saw Sarah daily and were there after the birth of Trig, know this to be an idiotic story.

We also saw Bristol regularly in jeans tight enough to convince anyone with eyes she was not with child. At first, Sarah made light of the story:

From: sarah
Sent: Tuesday, April 01, 2008 2:30 PM
Subject: Bristol

Todd: Don't tell (Bristol) but rumor around the capitol is that she's pregnant. People are so mean. I'm going to nicely pull McAllister (KTUU political reporter and soon to be Palin spokesperson) aside and tell him that's not true.

Funny people maybe speculated I'm not really pg, but she is and I'm taking the heat for her! Funny, but pathetic.

The next day, Sarah alerted us that Bristol had already heard the story:

Yeah- Brsitol (sic) just called and heard the rumors too, but this time is was from Wasilla High kids who heard that I'm not really pg, but she is, and I'll be taking/raising the baby she's supposedly having next month. She's ticked, but made light of it with, "They think I'm pregnant just because I have huge bo obs?" Told her to just tell those rumormongers that they're invited to peer at my stretch marks, that'll prove who's really pg .

Let's summarize:

Bill McAllister in his email to Brad Scharlott on April 5, 2011:

"I can tell you that I never even heard of the fake pregnancy rumor until the VP selection. Let me repeat that: As the most connected politics reporter in the state for years, I NEVER EVEN HEARD OF IT!!!!"

Sarah Palin in an email to her staff on April 1, 2008:

"Todd: Don't tell (Bristol) but rumor around the capitol is that she's pregnant. People are so mean. I'm going to nicely pull McAllister (KTUU political reporter and soon to be Palin spokesperson) aside and tell him that's not true."

Funny people maybe speculated I'm not really pg, but she is and I'm taking the heat for her! Funny, but pathetic.

We know that Sarah Palin then DID in fact pull Bill McAllister aside, from an article by Kyle Hopkins in the Anchorage Daily News from August 31, 2008.

Kyle Hopkins wrote:

Here's a story we wrote soon after the birth. At that point, the questions were all about whether Palin should have flown back to Alaska to give birth. In the story, Palin's doctor talks about the labor and addresses questions raised at the time about Palin's decision to board a jet and fly to Alaska from Texas when she showed signs of early labor.

"The stage of her pregnancy was not apparent by observation," said an Alaska Airlines spokeswoman. The doctor, Cathy Baldwin-Johnson, said she induced labor once Palin was at the hospital.

What's the McCain campaign say? Nothing so far. I've called and e-mailed for an on-the-record response, but haven't heard back.

What's Palin's in-state spokesman, Bill McAllister say?

That it's not true. "The answer to that is no," he said.

"But beyond that, I don't know, why should we even have to say anything," he said.

McAllister was an Anchorage TV reporter before working for Palin. He said Palin once approached him - before people knew she was pregnant - assuming he'd been hearing rumors.

"She said it's not true about Bristol," McAllister said.

At the time, the rumor would have been that Palin's daughter was pregnant.

How does McAllister know it's not true?

"The governor's not a liar. That's the main reason. But also this would have to involve some sort of conspiracy with the hospital of Wasilla. They said she gave birth there. Is the doctor, the nurses ... are they all lying?" he said.

Why not share the birth certificate?

"What a thing to request -- prove that this is your baby," McAllister said. "I mean, my god, that's horrifying to think that she would have to do that."

I said one reason is to put it to rest.

"In my mind, there's nothing to put to rest," he said.

No, Alaska birth certificates are not public record. Meantime, this is all a plotline straight out of a recent season of Desperate Housewives.

So it's proven that Bill McAllister was very well aware about the "false" rumor that Bristol was pregnant BEFORE she was pregnant with Tripp - and he now claims that he wasn't aware about the faked pregnancy rumors, which are basically a "derivative" of the first rumor?

In any case, I highly doubt that Bill McAllister was the "most connected politics reporter" in Alaska back then.

Others appeared to be much, much more connected - here Michael Carey from the Anchorage Daily News states on the record on September 2, 2008 that he had heard the rumor that Sarah Palin faked her pregnancy long before the nomination, that it was discussed in the newsroom and that one of his friends, a "smart lawyer", claimed that it's the "absolute truth" that Sarah Palin faked her pregnancy:

In this context is also interesting to note that after the election, Alaska journalist Brendan Joel Kelley published a very detailed and revealing portrait about Bill McAllister in the "Anchorage Press" on June 10, 2009.

There, Brendan Joel Kelley wrote:

McAllister went round and round with the press, including with the Anchorage Daily News, which had a reporter chasing a story about the persistent rumors that Palin’s baby Trig wasn’t really hers; ADN editor Pat Dougherty perpetuated the dustup between the two with posts on his editor’s blog. Asked to comment for this story by email, Dougherty replied, simply, “Brendan, No.”

In any case, historians have to decide who was "in the service of evil" and who wasn't.

But the journalists have to do their duty first. Now or never!

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UPDATE:

Joe McGinniss just wrote on his new blog:

"Rest assured, the question of whether Sarah is really Trig’s mother, or whether she faked the pregnancy and lied about the birth is not an issue I ignore in The Rogue."

Say it ain't so, Joe! ;-)

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Websites which linked to this post:

Joe McGinniss - "The Rogue" blog

The Alaska Dispatch (here and here)

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Click HERE to read all posts at Politicalgates about Sarah Palin's faked pregnancy.

Sarah Palin's former spokesman Bill McAllister hits back at Journalism Professor's research regarding Palin's Trig pregnancy hoax

By Kathleen

Dan Carpenter, Sarah Palin and Bill McAllister (taken April 13th 2008)

In a recent post Patrick hinted that there is more to come. Here is some of it.

The Northerner, the student newspaper for Northern Kentucky University, reveals that Bill McAllister, Sarah Palin's former communications director, has hit back at suggestions by a Northern Kentucky university professor, Brad Scharlott, that he may have been involved in a hoax regarding Sarah Palin's alleged pregnancy with Trig Palin.

Brad Scharlott is an Associate Professor in Journalism and has taught at Northern Kentucky since 1991. The Northerner writes that Scharlott recently completed a research paper "Palin, the Press, and the Fake Pregnancy Rumour" which explores the mainstream media's role in dealing with the rumours surrounding Palin's pregnancy with Trig and quotes Scharlott's motivation for doing so:

Scharlott said he first became interested in the pregnancy hoax rumor after Palin was nominated as a vice-presidential candidate, and said he was fascinated that no one from McCain’s camp chose to rebut the rumor.

In his paper, Scharlott says that the “oddness of the McCain’s campaign response to the fake birth rumors should have caused reporters, ostensibly skeptical by training and nature, to wonder if something was amiss.”

Scharlott asserts that this topic is relevant because Palin is still saying she may decide to run in the upcoming presidential election, “because if Palin has lied about the pregnancy, it says a lot about her character, her fitness for the presidency, and maybe even her mental health.”

.

“[There’s] a theory out of mass communications that ideas not in the mainstream can be squeezed out of the public sphere entirely,” Scharlott said. “I think that’s what happened with the idea that Palin may have faked the pregnancy and now, while some people may privately speak about it, no one in America wants to be quoted about it."

Scharlott sent the paper to Bill McAllister as a matter of "fairness" because he had suggested that McAllister may have been directly or indirectly "involved in a hoax". According to The Northerner McAllister's response was that he never knew anything of the rumour until she announced her vice-presidential bid. In the email McAllister asserts:

“I had never even heard a rumor [about this] until she was chosen by McCain, then that weekend all kinds of shit came out that no one had heard before,” McAllister said. “[Scharlott’s research] defames me and I’m just not having it."

It is hard to believe that McAllister had never heard of the fake pregnancy rumours before the election when you consider the fact that half of Alaska was discussing them at the end of March/beginning of April 2008 and that Palin herself wanted to prove the rumours wrong. How can it be possible that a highly experienced Alaskan journalist had missed hearing about such suggestions regarding the woman who was the Governor of his state? I find it hard to accept McAllister's denials.

You can read more at The Northerner which reveals details such as the fact that McAllister thinks Scharlott "should quit" and that he forwarded a copy of his email to five other members of the faculty. It would seem that McAllister would like nothing more than to curtail the distribution of Scharlott's paper and that he wants to discredit it in whatever way he can because it has the potential to open up a real investigation into the rumours of Palin's pregnancy with Trig.

Personally I am looking forward to seeing Professor Scharlott's research paper in the public domain. I hope you will not have to wait too long before you can read it.

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