At breakfast today, I told my son, “You know, it’s time for me to write again about Sarah Palin!”
As a fledgling blogger, I am very interested in checking out the stats of my blogs. And the discovery I made was not surprising.
So when my son asked me why I wanted to write about Sarah Palin yet again, I unabashedly told him that my posting about Sarah Palin gets a more consistent viewing than many of my other blogs, barring the one about “Even a cat has Karma“. Good enough reason to write about what the “Palin ingredient” does for the media.
Whatever Sarah Palin may represent to the rest of us, we all seem to have a love-hate relationship with her. Every feeling about Sarah is extreme. There are those who worship the ground she treads on, aka William Kristol, Sean Hannity, and some folks in Alaska.
And then there are those like me, who read about her and watch her on TV with incredulity. What on earth?…. is what we think when we hear her speak. Her brand of gibberish is certainly very entertaining and very very unique. She strives really hard to make sense, and I bet in her mind, she does make sense, but the words out of her mouth never seem to pause – they flow like the Ganges, ravishing all sane thought and idea in its wake.
What does Sarah Palin do for the media? Well, I have not yet heard anyone openly acknowledge her star power, so I will. As far as the Internet goes, any mention of Palin, has a Web site auto-ping and grab content to display on their site (0f course, with a link back to my blog!) – so that’s exposure right away. The minute I press the Publish Post button on this blog, I am going to get a ping back. Not bad.
As far as TV shows go – the ratings go through the roof, if the channel advertises that Sarah is going to be on the show. Why does this happen?
Again, two very different reasons – First off, lets not disregard the devotees, for they make up the true ratings.
They come out in droves to watch her, comprehend her utterances, interpret it to suit themselves, salivate over her good looks, discuss her hair, make-up, clothes and figure. These true ratings, in my opinion, are made up to two distinct categories of people – the men, some of whom comprise of the pimpled adolescent boys or the bored husbands who like to imagine her as the hot, bespectacled librarian. These are the kind who love to see eye-candy and get a kick out of seeing the Palin photo daily on the news. Honorable mention in this category are the Brits and the Pakistanis (led by the stalwart Zardari).
The second category is the women. These are the working women, housewives, forty-somethings, and women who dream of fame and recognition. To them, Sarah represents a dream come true – “someone like me” becoming famous. Some of these women are actually smart, good looking and educated. But their filter for viewing Sarah is themselves. They see her as themselves and so cut her slack for her incoherent talk, her rambling rhetoric and “interpret” her sentences for the rest of us, in the multiple blog comments.
Secondly, there are the infidels, like myself, who dare to be skeptics. This category comes out in droves too when a Sarah Palin show is aired, and this is the number that embellishes the ratings. These people come to see the Sarah Palin shows for entertainment. True entertainment. We watch in awe that someone like Sarah gets to be on prime time. We watch in horror and pain as she ties herself up in a flurry of her words, like a python slowly tightening its hold on its
prey. We watch in fascination, as the TV host lets her get away with answers that have no bearing on the question asked. And we watched with fear, when we thought she might, she just might, get to become VP and cast the pall of her intellect on America.
So there you go, my in-depth analysis of Sarah Palin’s media advantage :). Love her or hate her, you can never just ignore her.
And that’s true STAR POWER!!
Jaya's musings 