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Jon is just knocking them out of the park in this thread, it's like watching the home run derby.
On the specific issue of the Couric/Palin interview talking about news media, I think you have to keep in mind the deep contempt that most of Palin's intended audience has for the major media outlets. I'm not sure I totally agree with the calculus here, but when asked basically "what papers do you read?" she likely realized there's the potential to trigger a landmine there... say you read the New York Times or some other highly credentialed paper, and you come off like you're sleeping with the enemy. Say that you mostly read the Anchorage Salmonwrapper (or whatever it is) and you come off like a backwoods rube. What if you go to a standard conservative bastion like the Wall Street Journal -- that plays against your plain-spoken hockey mom persona. So you say what? Some Moonie paper? Some hackjob right-wing rag from San Jose? Nah, at that point you're just at risk of endorsing something that might get you into trouble. If you smell this question as a political landmine... and again, it's your own base that sets it up this way... then the best answer, in a flash of judgment, may well seem like a non-answer deferral. And that's what she did.
So, in my view, it wasn't that she is/was too stupid to be able to name a newspaper. She was actually evidencing some degree of "thinking on her feet" albeit maybe not that artfully handled.
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