Pat:

In looking at the tally of complaints the governor's office has with the media, this is but one of them with one outlet, the list is quite long, and I'm attempting to be as thorough as I can in contacting the outlets and reporters they've taken issue with to see if you'd like to address the complaint. If so, i'd love to have your response to that in the article. Thanks.

Brendan Joel Kelley
Associate Editor
Anchorage Press

Brendan:

Thanks for your note. In response to your question, I would pose this question to Gov. Palin and Bill McAllister:

The Daily News ignored the Trig controversy for more than four months. Not only has the paper never written a story about it, until last month no one at the ADN had ever done any serious reporting on it. If the Daily News were interested in reporting the "Trig birth conspiracy" as straight news, why would the paper wait three or four months before starting to look into it?

Because that's how we usually handle news? Hardly.

Is it really so implausible that we watched this conspiracy theory swirl and grow and show no sign of going away for months before we finally decided to try to report a story about the persistence of bizarre claims surrounding the birth of the governor's son?

I think most competent journalists would recognize "the persistence of bizarre claims surrounding the birth of any governor's son" as the basis of a potentially interesting story. Most competent journalists would also understand that the story doesn't work if it can't show that the claims are false. For the purpose of a newspaper story, it's only a "bizarre conspiracy theory" if we can demonstrate that it's untrue, which is why we wanted to document the truth. Up until now, we have had no interest in proving to the real doubters that Trig was indeed Sarah Palin's baby.

Why this isn't obvious to Bill McAllister, who has worked as a reporter, I can't explain.

As I said to the governor in an email today:

If the story had been done, with Lisa Demer's typical thoroughness, I think you would have found it helpful in putting this nonsense to rest. . . . But that's water under the bridge. We have no further interest . . .

Pat Dougherty

Oh, and the fact that the Cancel the Bee blog thinks my name is Jim is a pretty good reflection of its overall accuracy.