Here in St. Paul, I was on NPR this evening with a man named Michael Carey, who is a columnist and former editorial page editor for the Anchorage Daily News. We started talking, of course, about the day’s Palin news — the fake baby story and the real baby story. As far as the fake baby story was concerned, Carey told me that the rumors were going around in Alaska a few months ago, not long after the birth of Sarah Palin’s fifth child. He told me that Daily News reporters and editors explored the story quite extensively, and, as Carey said on NPR, “could find no basis for it except that people who didn’t like Sarah Palin believed it.” He told me that Daily News reporters talked at length to the Palins about it — Carey said the Palins were actually eager to talk about the rumor because they knew how much it had spread around Alaska. He also said Daily News reporters looked into the medical angle of the rumor, which included talking to at least one doctor involved, and again found nothing to support the story. In the end, Carey told me, the newspaper became “convinced that it was not true.”
What is amazing about all this is how making just one phone call to a man like Carey could have given some of the bloggers at The Atlantic and DailyKos pause before they wrote so extensively about it. Why didn’t they do that?