Today is the big day everyone! Thousands and thousands of emails from former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin have been released into the wild, and every single news organization will be trying to aerially hunt the news that might be contained within them. Perhaps Sarah Palin has something to worry about, but I have to imagine that this evening, as she relaxes her way into another weekend, she will think on this and laugh. Mainly at us.
Like many other organizations that cover politics, we at The Huffington Post have made our arrangements to obtain the emails, have handed out assignments to reporters and are hopeful that a crowdsource army will help pick up the slack. What are we expecting to find? Who knows? Maybe a lot of Comic Sans. Maybe some penetrating new story about Palin's Alaska reign. Maybe it will be a hot pile of nothing! Yeah, that's right: One possible outcome of this exercise is that it will be a complete bust.
Don't get me wrong. There's always some nominal value in paging through the communiques of a public figure, and Palin -- who's been as public a figure as any -- is a good candidate for this attention. But it's really not hard to think that the joke might somehow be on us. After all, so what if we find something damning about a former public official whose not likely to be anything more than an itinerant rich person for the rest of her life? Perhaps we will uncover some heretofore unknown brilliance that propels her to the top of the 2012 food chain and restores her in the eyes of the public? Are you ready for that, America?
Mainly, I think the media -- and I'm implicating HuffPost, and me, in this as well! -- is going to open itself up to some worthy public criticism. "This is something you'll spend time and resources to cover?" you will say. And you will be right.
If it means anything, your reward will be that you will have a much more enjoyable weekend than any of us.
Ahh, this week. I've seen things you people wouldn't believe: blurry photo renderings of a man's genitals, campaign staffers evacuating en masse from Newt Gingrich. I watched tens of thousands of emails glitter on my laptop screen in a searchable PDF database. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in the rain. Time to die.
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