Anchorage Daily News journalist Julia O'Malley: "Photoshopping", "lightened pictures" and "reading comprehension skills" - A journalistic failure

By Patrick

Yesterday I was on the little twitter thing upon which I dutifully tweeted out my last post to numerous receipients such as Julia O'Malley, journalist for the Anchorage Daily News, who is also on twitter (click on pictures to enlarge)

The reason for tweeting Julia O'Malley in particular was of course her "Make.It.Stop." article at the Anchorage Daily News dated April 14, 2011, in which she claimed that Sarah Palin was indeed pregnant. I published a detailed response to this article on April 17, 2011 in my "Shame.On.You." post. Curiously, Julia O'Malley presented as her main proof at the beginning of her article a picture from March 2008 in which Sarah Palin looks "obviously pregnant", according to Julia O'Malley.

Julia O'Malley chose to respond to my tweet, and the following twitter conversation proved to be a truly enlightening venture. Unfortunately, Julia O'Malley also chose to delete most of those tweets just several minutes after our twitter conversation had finished - and she did so for good reason as she made some very ill-thought comebacks to my questions. However, and fortunately for us, I do know how to make screenshots, and I make them very, very fast. It would have been a real shame if this conversation had been lost, because rarely has a journalist provided better proof for for his or her ineptitude as far as Sarah Palin's pregnancy with Trig is concerned.

Julia O'Malley's first response to my tweet is still online:

"Ghosts and aliens", sure. Oh yes, anyone questioning Sarah's account of her pregnancy can be officially designated as part of the craaazies and lumped in with all conspiracy theorists.

Julia didn't have to wait long for my response:

I was referring to this passage in her "Make.It.Stop." article in which she said:

I read Scharlott's piece. It contains lots of innuendo and some widely-circulated Photoshopped pictures. What is missing from his investigation: facts.

In my "Shame.On.You." reply at Politicalgates I point out that Professor Bradford Scharlott did not use any photoshopped pictures in his academic paper about the Trig pregnancy hoax at all.

It now turns out that Julia O'Malley apparently has a very different understanding of the word "photoshopped", because she explained in her response to my tweet:

So Julia O'Malley believes that "photoshopping" pictures is the same as "lightening" pictures. Interesting!

Let's take a look at what Wikipedia says about the term "photoshopping":

Photoshopping is slang for the digital editing of photos. The term originates from Adobe Photoshop, the image editor most commonly used by professionals for this purpose; however, other programs, such as Paint Shop Pro, Corel Photopaint, Pixelmator, Paint.NET, or GIMP, may be used. Adobe Systems, the publisher of Adobe Photoshop, discourages use of the term "photoshop" as a verb out of concern that it may undermine the company's trademark.

Despite this, photoshop is widely used as a verb, both colloquially and academically, to refer to retouching, compositing (or splicing), and color balancing carried out in the course of graphic design, commercial publishing, and image editing.

In popular culture, the term photoshopping is sometimes associated with montages in the form of visual jokes, such as those published on the fark.com website and in MAD Magazine. Images may be propagated memetically via e-mail as humor or passed as actual news. An example of the latter category is "Helicopter Shark," which was widely circulated as a so-called "National Geographic Photo of the Year" and was later revealed to be a hoax.

Excuse my, Julia, but from this explanation alone it is obvious that "photoshopping" is in general widely understood in the first place as a method to digitally manipulate photos in a way that they afterwards show something profoundly different than before. In your article, you deliberately left the impression that pictures which were used by Professor Scharlott were manipulated in such a dishonest way, an impression which is completely false. One can lighten digital pictures even with the smallest editing programs - and even if you for example develop colour photo negatives in a shop, they are usually lightened automatically for printing. No serious photographer would regard this as "photoshopping."

Interestingly, Julia O'Malley apparently believes that it's better to keep her interpretation of what constitutes "photoshopping" a secret, because she deleted her tweet shortly afterwards. Which is a shame, because a significant portion of her readership in Alaska will now continue to believe that Professer Scharlott dishonestly manipulated pictures.

I then gave what I considered to be a very appropriate reply to Julia O'Malley:

However, the ineptitude of Julia O'Malley didn't stop there. The conversation went on.

Kathleen then twittered her over Kathleen's "ScarahPlainUSA" twitter account:

To which Julia O'Malley responded:

"I can't be responsible for reading comprehension problems."

While it is regrettable that the readers of the Anchorage Daily News are apparently expected to interpret articles in the way that Julia O'Malley meant them to be interpreted despite her flawed use of technical terms, it is even more regrettable that Julia O'Malley then chose to delete this tweet as well. If it weren't for the mysterious procedure which we call "screenshotting", her readership would have never known.

As Julia O'Malley used her "own" picture in her article to prove that Sarah Palin was pregnant (a picture which cannot be reproduced without permission, as the Anchorage Daily News explicitly states), I thought that it was just fair to point Julia to a picture which showed Sarah Palin non-pregnant on March 26, 2008, three weeks before she officially gave birth to a baby weighing six pounds, two oz. on April 18, 2008:

I was talking of course about this picture from March 26, 2008, just about three weeks before officially giving birth to a six-pound baby (click to enlarge):

Sarah Palin on March 26, 2008, at the Alaska State Museum in Juneau. See our recent post about the ADN-article by Julia O'Malley for the extensive documentation regarding this picture.

Julia O'Malley was not shy and tweeted back:

Julia O'Malley apparently had forgotten that she herself used a picture in her article as one of her main pieces of evidence for the assertion that Sarah Palin was in fact pregnant.

I also thought it was just fair to remind her that a journalist should not put his reputation on the line for a serial, proven liar such as Sarah Palin:

To which Julia O'Malley responded:

Responded , blocked me and then deleted her tweets.

Which is a real shame, because I sent more tweets which contained hard and very inconvenient facts, for example:

I was talking about this TV-interview with ADN-columnist Michael Carey:

It seems that a few simple tweets really got under Julia O'Malley's skin:

Was it because her answers were simply curiously illogical?

Just for the record here are Julia O'Malley's tweets to me that she has since "tweleted" (tweets that have been deleted because the tweeter realises that their responses make them look stupid):

Not much has survived:

Julia O'Malley was an almost embarrassingly lightweight sparring partner. I am quite shocked that journalistic standards at the Anchorage Daily News, the largest newspaper in Alaska, have fallen so low.

Julia O'Malley and other journalists such as Dave Weigel from Slate, Justin Elliott from Salon, Jason Linkins from Huffington Post and Megan Carpentier from Raw Story are unable to grasp the fact that it's not enough to brand the doubters of Sarah Palin pregnancy, called "Trig Truthers" by the Palin camp as some sort of mad conspiracy theorists. It's instead necessary for them to deal with facts in a rational, open and transparent way, and sadly, none of these people are willing to do that. This epic failure of journalism will make for a highly interesting case study one day, and I am sure that somebody is already busy taking notes.

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Investigative book about "Babygate", Sarah Palin's faked pregnancy with Trig, about to be published by major US journalist

By Patrick

"Facts need testimony to be remembered and trustworthy witnesses to be established in order to find a secure dwelling place in the domain of human affairs. From this, it follows that no factual statement can ever be beyond doubt—as secure and shielded against attack as, for instance, the statement that two and two make four.

It is this fragility that makes deception so very easy up to a point, and so tempting. It never comes into a conflict with reason, because things could indeed have been as the liar maintains they were. Lies are often much more plausible, more appealing to reason, than reality, since the liar has the great advantage of knowing beforehand what the audience wishes or expects to hear. He has prepared his story for public consumption with a careful eye to making it credible, whereas reality has the disconcerting habit of confronting us with the unexpected, for which we were not prepared."

–Hannah Arendt, “Lying in Politics” in Crises of the Republic (1972)

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The ride is not over yet, it's just about to begin.

Sarah Palin's faked pregnancy, for years a taboo subject in the mainstream media, is not a taboo subject any more - but that doesn't mean that the media have "distinguished" themselves. Indeed the opposite has been the case. We have recently observed respected journalists put their credibility on the line for the serial liar Sarah Palin, claiming in a serious of articles that the faked pregnancy never, ever possibly could have happened.

These articles, which will go down in history as one of the major failures of American journalism, steadfastly and stubbornly ignore facts, reason and common sense, as we have explained in a series of posts. Journalists such as Julia O'Malley from the Anchorage Daily News, Justin Elliott from Salon, Dave Weigel from Slate, Megan Carpentier from Raw Story and Jason Linkins from Huffington Post are going to ask themselves how it was possible that they actually believed the claims of Sarah Palin, a woman who basically lies about "everything", even "about the weather", as Palin-biographer Geoffrey Dunn recently mentioned in an interview with Politicalgates. A woman who also produced a piece of "100% fiction" with her book Going Rogue, according to the former McCain-campaign manager Steve Schmidt.

Their articles will surely come back to haunt them.

Well, I guess they believed Sarah Palin because they wanted to believe her.

Like it or not, that was how Sarah Palin looked on March 26, 2008, just about three weeks before officially giving birth to a six-pound baby (click to enlarge):

Sarah Palin on March 26, 2008, at the Alaska State Museum in Juneau. See our recent post about the ADN-article by Julia O'Malley for the extensive documentation regarding this picture.

For anybody who is not willing to close his or her eyes, the picture which Prof. Brad Scharlott recently published in a post at Politicalgates is also a real "eye-opener":

The fact that many journalists were only too happy to embrace the assertion that "Trig Trutherism" is a nutty conspiracy theory becomes particularly apparent when one looks for example the way in which Dave Weigel recently exploited the issue of "Trig Trutherism" in an article at Slate and wrote what you could call a roundup of the "world of conspiracies", as Weigel calls it, which apparently plague the American nation.

He writes:

Good news, everyone! We have survived the latest flare-up of the conspiracy theory generally known as "Trig Trutherism"—the discredited hypothesis that Sarah Palin's youngest son is not hers.

Last week, The Lies of Sarah Palin author Geoffrey Dunn published a lengthy piece—spiked by the Huffington Post, then acquired by the traffic-hungrier Business Insider—going over the same turf. His argument was blown to smithereens by Justin Elliott at Salon as well as by other reporters who sighed and decided to engage with one of the duller conspiracy theories of all time. (A serious conspiracy theory should seem less like a General Hospital subplot.)

(...)

It's a familiar rationale for conspiracy theorists: They investigate as much in sorrow as in anger. They are always just one confession away from the truth. This kind of logic is much more understandable, if no more sensible, after reading Among the Truthers: A Journey Through America's Growing Conspiracist Underground, a smart and serious new book by Canadian journalist Jonathan Kay. His book shows why Americans are becoming so willing to believe lurid fantasies about the government or politicians they don't like or vaccines or the theory that the federal government was behind the attacks of 9/11 (these believers are the "truthers" of his title). And you realize that the world of conspiracies is only going to get larger.

The "world of conspiracies is only going to get larger?" Well, I don't know about that, but I would say that the world of journalists who don't believe in fact-checking and rational arguments is getting larger - and growing very fast.

Yesterday, the journalist Debra J. Saunders, a long time Sarah Palin apologist, joined the club of clueless journalists in a particularly ridiculous article in the San Francisco Chronicle called "Was Sarah Palin done in by Trig "birther" story?" Astonishingly, she claims that the babygate-bloggers are somewhat responsible for Sarah Palin's demise and writes:

When McCain picked Palin, his campaign team thought the media would hail Palin as a fellow maverick, a moderate who could work with Democrats, and avoided polarizing social issues by, for example, vetoing a bill banning benefits for same-sex spouses of state workers. That is, Camp McCain expected the sort of in-depth look that Green provided in "The Tragedy of Sarah Palin."

They also thought that personal profiles would portray Palin as a pro-life Republican who walked the walk when she chose to give birth to a son with Down syndrome.

Alas and woe to her, Palin had the misfortune of walking onto the national stage in the era of the blogosphere. A Daily Kos blogger charged that Palin faked giving birth to Trig five months earlier in order to conceal her teenage daughter Bristol's pregnancy. Other bloggers, as well as British and Australian newspapers, joined the pile-on. That rumor was put to rest for all but the most ardent Palin "birthers" when Bristol turned out to be five months pregnant.

While most reputable American news outlets did not report the rumors, the Washington Post's Howard Kurtz wrote at the time that reporters deluged the campaign with questions "about the governor's amniotic fluid, the timing of her contractions and whether she would take a DNA test to establish the baby's parentage." Those questions enraged the McCainiacs.

But how can the "Babygate-bloggers" be responsible for Sarah Palin's recent fall from grace, if there was nothing at all "to see?" It would have taken Sarah Palin less than one day to prove that she is the biological mother of Trig - after all, she would virtually "drown" in a huge pile of documentation, wouldn't she? Birth certificate, hospital records, insurance records, photos, emails, etc. etc. etc.

How much documentation do YOU have for the birth of YOUR child, dear journalists all over the USA who do a solid, professional and diligent job every day?

Where are the journalists? Very slowly, they appear. Fore example, Henry Blodget from "Business Insider" recently distinguished himself with giving the "doubters" of Sarah Palin's pregnancy a voice, and for asking Sarah Palin to release Trig's birth certificate. Although he also took a lot of heat from his readers in the comments, as was to be expected, his efforts will not be in vain.

That's the situation we have right now, but it's about to change - radically.

Already more than a month ago, we received information from "somebody in the business" that a major D.C. based journalist is currently writing a book solely about "babygate", Sarah Palin's faked pregnancy - and that the book deal has already been signed and that it should be published soon! We did, of course, immediately share this information with some important people behind the scenes who will no doubt be conducting their own follow up investigations.

Up until now we kept this very important piece of information quiet on Politicalgates because we didn't want to spoil the "surprise". However the facts about the existence of this book are now being alluded to in public so we believe that the time has come to reveal what we know. The pending publication of such a book comes as no surprise to us, as anyone who questions Sarah Palin's account of "babygate" in an unbiased way and with an open mind will quickly realize that the pregnancy was faked.

There are major forces, especially in Alaska, that are desperately trying to prevent the publication of the truth. Several people in Alaska are deeply implicated in covering up Sarah Palin's faked pregnancy, especially the officials of Mat-Su Regional Medical Center in Palmer, where Sarah Palin "officially" gave birth. The largest newspaper in Alaska, the Anchorage Daily News, is "guilty" as well, as their journalists have started to twist the facts and distort the truth of the details of Palin's pregnancy and the details of the subsequent investigation into the pregnancy in order to keep Sarah's "secret" under wraps. Apparently because they are afraid too lose valuable government contracts. The ADN interviewed Sarah Palin's now "invisible" doctor, Cathy Baldwin-Johnson, in late 2008, as well as other people, including babygate-bloggers, in a new investation by ADN-journalist Lisa Demer, for a story which in the end never appeared. Editor Pat Dougherty observed back then, in an email to Sarah Palin in January 2009:

It strikes me that if there is never a clear, contemporaneous public record of what transpired with Trig's birth that may actually ensure that the conspiracy theory never dies.

Well, the "conspiracy theory" hasn't died, and how could it - the truth will always prevail, especially when it comes to a serial, and bad, liar like Sarah Palin.

Let's conclude with a quote by another late intellectual, Aldous Huxley:

"Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make ye mad."

I won't be mad, I will just be happy. Although I am still mad with some journalists who do not perform their job.

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*** All posts by Politicalgates about Sarah Palin's faked pregnancy are available HERE, HERE and HERE. ***

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Additional note:

The donation of ten copies of Geoffrey Dunn's book to those readers who could not afford to buy the book was a great success. Many thanks again to everybody who came up with the idea and who donated! We plan to offer more free books, after publication, by Frank Bailey, Joe McGinniss, Levi Johnston and of course after the publication of the mentioned upcoming book about "Babygate." Some readers have already agreed to take part in our new upcoming " book donation drive." As always, we are happy that we have such a great, vibrant and supportive community here at Politicalgates.

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

Shaving Babygate Theories With Occam's Razor - Megan Carpentier, please take note

By Ennealogic

Thanks to a rather vitriolic post by Megan Carpentier of the Guardian, in which she asserts that "Trig Truthers" are bitter, misogynistic and ill-informed to boot, I got to thinking about one of her more outrageous statements: "In the stubbly nether regions of the internet untouched by Occam's razor, a dedicated group of (mostly) men seeks to prove that the Palin family drama is more soap operatic than the family has already acknowledged."

Apparently Ms. Carpentier is unaware that I, and many co-researchers, fellow bloggers and commenters who contribute to the ever-growing body of knowledge about the fraud that is Sarah Palin, are mothers and grandmothers. We "Trig Truthers" are hardly misogynistic. We seem to be considerably more aware than she is about the bizarre soap opera phenomenon that is Wasilla's Palin family. That Ms. Carpentier brags having used the word, "vagina," three times in her story does not comfort me into accepting she understands the babygate dilemma at all. Razors and vaginas and nether regions oh my!—this is not about shaving pubic hair, this is about a pregnancy hoax, and if Ms. Carpentier had spent any time at all learning about the details of the story instead of dashing off a "cracking piece," she just might have been able to add something to the discussion instead of serving to spiral the question further into silence.

A very old razor

Let's examine two theories of how Trig Palin came to be Sarah's "son" and see what we can most reasonably infer when taking Occam's Razor into account. Perhaps Occam's Razor doesn't apply to babygate at all but if it does, the essence of how that principle might be stated goes like this: In cases where two alternate theories produce the same outcome, the simpler one is to be preferred until additional facts emerge.

Sir Isaac Newton restated the rule as, "We are to admit no more causes of natural things than such as are both true and sufficient to explain their appearances." I think this is a good formulation because it maintains that explanations need be both true and sufficient. Yet! Are the observations for Theory #1, below, even present, much less true and sufficient?

Another formulation states, ""If you have two theories that both explain the observed facts, then you should use the simplest until more evidence comes along." The validity of any theory depends on "observed facts." So which of the two is actually the better theory?

Theory #1 - According to Sarah's versions of the story, she gave birth on a Friday morning to a 5-week (or 7-week) premature Down syndrome baby, at Mat-Su Regional Medical Center (or maybe in Anchorage), after taking two flights from Texas to Alaska and driving in the snow for another hour, and after leaking amniotic fluid (or not) since early the previous morning. She subsequently brought the preemie to work with her on the following Monday for show and tell.

Documentation of Live Birth (missing from evidence)

A certified Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (not available at Mat-Su Regional Medical Center)

Theory #2 - Sarah Palin was not pregnant in at all in 2008, but perpetrated a birth-story hoax which she initiated publicly on March 5, 2008 and carries through to this day. The Down syndrome child has been adopted by the Palins.

Trig Palin on 18th April, 2008: "A 5-7 week premature infant"

For Theory #1 we should expect to observe:

a birth certificate
an announcement entered by the hospital
pictures of a 5-7 week premature infant taken within a day or two of birth
an explanation of how the attending Family Practice doctor (CBJ) came to the conclusion that it was okay for Sarah Palin to travel by air and car for 11 hours without getting checked out along the way
an honest explanation of why and how the hospital - its directors, staff and doctors - agreed to induce this multipara, 44 yr-old with a high risk pregnancy in a facility that doesn't even have a level 1 NICU instead of stabilizing and transporting her to a facility in Anchorage equipped to handle such deliveries
a further honest explanation of how such an infant was permitted to be handled by her son's military buddies and the elder Heaths within a day of his birthing, and then brought into a public office environment just three days later
entries in the then governor's daily schedule dating what should have been frequent pre-natal visits
medical records evidencing pre-natal visits and tests
empirical evidence in the form of statements, e-mails, images and video from media, colleagues, friends and other community members supporting the fact of Sarah's 7-8 month pregnancy
and a consistent story of how, when and where the birth happened

For Theory #2 we should expect to observe:

photographic and video evidence of a lack of a pregnant belly both before and after Sarah Palin's pregnancy announcement
empirical evidence in the form of statements from media, colleagues, casual bystanders, community members and airline personnel that she did not appear pregnant even just before the announced birth date
an unexplained reluctance to allow questions or provide documentation regarding the birth
occasional hostility and a flippant attitude toward anyone questioning the story
confusion, hesitation, and inconsistencies in her telling of the birth and pregnancy stories
a less-than-motherly caring demonstrated toward the Down syndrome child she claimed she was desperate for

In my opinion, there is currently, and quite simply, insufficient evidence to warrant accepting Theory #1. Remember, a theory must be explained by observed facts. But there was no birth certificate released. There was no hospital announcement, nor any explanation explaining the high risk delivery in a sub-par medical facility. Nor has there been an explanation for the presentation of (and public showing-off of) a chubby-cheeked baby who was supposed to be 5-7 weeks premature, jaundiced, with a hole in his heart. No contemporaneous governor's calendar entries have been unearthed, nor has there been any confirmation of pre-natal testing and visits. The documentary trail with any suggestion at all that Sarah Palin was pregnant consists only of:

1. the mysteriously appearing and disappearing "Gusty" photos,
2. a video shot by Elan Frank wherein Sarah Palin drums on an apparently jelly-filled square-shaped pillow of a belly for a few seconds but also is shown jauntily going up and down stairs and easily bending over, and
3. the very recent recollections by an unnamed friend of an unnamed source who saw Sarah with a pregnant belly at a gym when the location, date and time are not given.

After taking a look at Theory #2 and the evidence on file for each observation (see links below), we should also remember that Sarah Palin is a skilled liar. If the soon-to-be-released book by Frank Bailey, et al, is anything like the leaked manuscript, we learn over and over again how facile a liar Sarah Palin is, and how she proceeds from one lie to another without a hint of remorse. We also learn how secretive she is, and how she compartmentalizes various lies, never bringing everyone fully into the loop. Her lies are not only normal lies, they are odd lies—lies that don't need to be told.

So, in spite of Ms. Carpentier's clever phrase-turning, Occam's Razor apparently works to shave away the fatuous assertions in her article, at least for anyone who has taken the time to actually look at the facts:

Sarah Palin, apparently, couldn't have just gotten pregnant the way the rest of the world does and she couldn't have delivered a baby the way the rest of the women of the world do. She couldn't have had and recognised a few Braxton Hicks contractions after bearing four children, and gotten on a plane to have the birth of her fifth, special-needs child in her hometown, and had it all be perfectly above board.

No, she couldn't. And the body of evidence that says she couldn't has nothing to do with misogynistic men trying to peer into her "mysterious lady parts."

To review the evidence on file for Theory #2, please see Politicalgates' collection. For an honest appraisal of both theories, read Brad Scharlott's research paper. Or just Google, "Palin pregnancy hoax." And then with an open mind, read.

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Posted in "The Guardian": Sarah Palin, unreliable narrator - By Kathleen Baker, editor of Politicalgates

It's wrong to cast those who question Trig's birth story as crazed conspiracy theorists when the media have not done their job

By Kathleen Baker, editor of Politicalgates

Originally published at "The Guardian"

Then Alaska Governor Sarah Palin with Lieutenant Governor Sean Parnell, and Sandy Parnell, as Palin announced her endorsement of Parnell in his run for a congressional seat, on 14 March 2008, at the state elections office in Anchorage, Alaska. Palin's son Trig was born just over a month later on 18 April. Photograph: Michael Dinneen/AP Photo

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+++UPDATE: Very sorry guys - the Guardian has pulled the article AGAIN, now for the second time even with the reworded version which you can read below (the rewording was done because the Guardian had requested it). We will see what happens next...keep the fingers crossed that everything will turn out to be fine. The communication with the Guardian is very friendly and open. +++ UPDATE APRIL 29: The Guardian is still checking with their lawyers whether they can put the article back up again. +++ UPDATE 2, APRIL 29: Matt Seaton, editor at the Guardian, just told us: "Got legal clearance; no further changes called for. Article is back on site."

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The rumours surrounding Sarah Palin's pregnancy with Trig have been an issue that found little attention in the media until two weeks ago, when a research paper by Bradford Scharlott, associate professor of journalism at Northern Kentucky University, hit the mainstream. Professor Scharlott asserted in his paper that there exists a "spiral of silence" in the media regarding the circumstances surrounding Trig Palin's birth.

Scharlott was not the first person to make this observation. Since August 2008, the influential blogger Andrew Sullivan, editor at the "The Dish", has repeatedly and harshly criticised the media for its unwillingness to report on Sarah Palin's pregnancy in a long series of posts on his blog. In addition, Sullivan published an article in the Sunday Times (of London) on 22 November 2009, in which he gave a summary of Sarah Palin's incredible birth story and astutely observed that her account makes "Xena, the warrior princess, seem fragile" in comparison.

But what is Sarah Palin's birth story, and why is it relevant?

A short look at the available documentation reveals that a coherent birth story is hard to determine, as several versions exist – all told by Sarah Palin herself. The first version, audiotaped during a press conference on 21 April 2008, is the one where Sarah Palin went on the record right after Trig's birth. During the press conference, the following exchange happened:

Reporter: So did your water break?

Palin: Well, if you must know more of those type of details, but, um …

Reporter: Well, your dad said that and I saw him say it so that's why I asked.

Palin: Well that was again if, if I must get personal, technical about this at the same time, um, it was one, it was a sign that I knew, um, could lead to uh, labour being uh kind of kicked in there was any kind of, um, amniotic leaking, amniotic fluid leaking, so when, when that happened we decided OK let's call her.

This exchange established that Palin's waters broke during the early hours of the morning on 17 April 2008 in Dallas, Texas. Lisa Demer quoted in the Anchorage Daily News an obstetrician, who confirmed: "To us, leaking and broken, we are talking the same thing. We are talking doctor-speak."

This statement by Sarah Palin was the "trigger" for deep scepticism on part of some journalists regarding the veracity of Palin's birth story, as well as the start of investigations by bloggers and citizens. I have played a role in these investigations since November 2008. Since then, a lot of new material has been discovered – and Sarah Palin has herself changed the details of Trig's birth story several times. In her autobiography, Going Rogue, there is no mention of her "amniotic fluid leaking", but Palin changes her account on page 193 by claiming that she was woken at 4am on 17 April 2008 by a "strange sensation low in my belly".

This change to the general storyline came as no surprise to the bloggers. By her own account, Sarah Palin's pregnancy was a "high-risk" one: she was 44 years old, and it was her seventh pregnancy (she had two previous miscarriages); the baby had Down's Syndrome, and was about to be born prematurely. The fact that Palin, despite the obvious complications, embarked on a ten-hour plane journey from Dallas to Anchorage with a stopover in Seattle, bypassing the first-rate Baylor Regional Medical Centre in Dallas with an NICU situated ten minutes away from the conference she was attending, is mystifying – even more so since Palin also bypassed Providence hospital in Anchorage, which is also equipped with excellent NICU facilities which would have ensured a safe delivery for her premature son.

Sarah Palin officially gave birth at Mat-Su Regional Medical Centre on 18 April 2008, a local hospital with no NICU, to 6lb 2oz Trig, who was presented by his grandparents to the journalists just a few hours after his birth. Oddly, in a memorable appearance in Waco, Texas, on 14 September 2010, Palin, after bragging that she holds the "world record" in hiding her pregnancy and joking about the "Trig truthers", told the audience that she "had the baby in Anchorage", when official accounts have her giving birth 45 minutes away in Palmer.

Why are there so many apparent contradictions in Palin's account of Trig's birth story? Many blogs have addressed this question: for example, on the blogs Politicalgates, Palingates and Palin's Deceptions, as well as Andrew Sullivan on the Daily Dish. The controversy was known at the time of Sarah Palin's nomination for vice-presidential candidate, with Michael Carey, an editor for the Anchorage Daily News, making explicit reference to rumours, at the Republican convention. Despite the considerable attention that Professor Scharlott's paper has received since it was released, Sarah Palin and her fans have been strangely silent on the issue. Palin could end the public discussion immediately by presenting hard evidence, such as hospital or insurance records. She once claimed to have shown Trig's birth certificate, but to this day, no journalist has seen it.

This issue is not about misogyny, as Megan Carpentier claimed in her recent commentary in the Guardian. We are not misogynist and we have no interest in examining Sarah Palin's "vagina". The majority of our readers, supporters and researchers are female, and they are usually women with experience in giving birth. There are also many readers who have medical backgrounds who strongly question Palin's account of Trig's birth. I also would like to point out that we are also not fixated on the pregnancy, as Carpentier asserts, but have written about many different issues regarding Sarah Palin.

The questions about Sarah Palin's pregnancy are relevant, because they raise issues of trust about a woman who almost became the vice-president of the US and who still has a large following and political influence. Journalists who now quickly declare this matter "closed" without having examined the evidence should be reminded that former McCain campaign manager Steve Schmidt is on the record saying that Palin's book Going Rogue comprises "not 70%, but 100% fiction". Journalists should take this statement more seriously before putting their reputation on the line for Sarah Palin. Instead, they should ask her some tough questions.

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APPEAL FOR DONATIONS - POLITICALGATES DONATION WEEK:

This week we would like to make our first appeal for donations, and we announce the "Politicalgates Donation Week." All donations, small and great, help us to keep going and help us to continue to invest a lot of time and effort into running this blog.

For donations via paypal, please click on the button below or in the sidebar. After the donation week, we will remove the button again.

If you would like to donate via cash, check or money order, please send us an email for further instructions: kathleenpoliticalgates (at) gmail.com

The results again has been very good. So far we have received $ 1250, with several pledges still to come in. Many thanks, everybody! The donation week will continue until May 3rd, 2011.

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All posts at Politicalgates about Sarah Palin's faked pregnancy can be read HERE and HERE.

All old posts at Palingates about "babygate" with the pictures still intact can be accessed HERE.