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Political Propaganda Meets Reality TV in Sarah Palin’s Alaska

By: Guest ContributorOct. 19th, 2010more from Guest Contributor

For the few naive souls who may have thought that Sarah Palin’s TLC reality show and her 2012 presidential ambitions are not related, check out the first clip from Sarah Palin’s Alaska, where Palin and family just happen to run across a real live mama grizzly. Hopefully the bear fared better those most of the mama grizzlies that Palin endorsed.

Here’s the clip:

TLC humorously described the clip as, “Sarah escapes her busy schedule to spend quality time with her family in Alaska. They go salmon fishing in bear country.” The teaser for this clip should say, “Palin family paid a big pile of money to pretend to go salmon fishing in bear country. Family tries desperately to avoid direct eye contact with their mentally unstable matriarch. Watch a “fishing trip” turn into a 2012 infomercial for Sarah Palin.”

As was pointed out last month, Sarah Palin’s outdoorsy image is a complete fraud. Last month my colleague Sarah Jones wrote, “For two years now, we’ve been sold the notion of Palin as Mama Grizzly, the great hunter and fisher woman who spends her free time hunting up meat that she then whips up into a delicious moose stew for her huge family, all while traipsing around the country selling “feminism” as something which no longer involves women being equal partners, having their freedoms, or having dominion over their own bodies. Turns out, this is a lie. Sarah Palin doesn’t hunt, or if she does, she does it illegally.”

What TLC is putting on the air starting on November 14 is an eight episode long political commercial. This is an unprecedented step for television channel that isn’t Fox News to willingly push a future presidential candidate’s message and brand. The show may be disguised as entertainment, but its purpose is to push the political outsider, hockey mom from Alaska myth that Palin ran on in 2008. Instead of rebranding herself for 2012, Sarah Palin is trying to breathe new life into a characterization that ran out of gas in October 2008.

It would have been completely out of character for Palin not to inject politics into her TLC show. After all, 2012 along a big fat million dollar paycheck are the reasons that she agreed to do the show, but you have to wonder what Discovery was thinking when they bought the reality show that she was pitching. Apparently, they haven’t seen her poll numbers. Politicians who sport 22% approval ratings usually aren’t the kind of folks who deliver the big Neilson numbers. They probably should have called the show Barack Obama’s Alaska, as he is now more popular in the state than she is.

Discovery paid Palin, who according to polling is as popular as BP in the US, one million dollars, so that they could have the honor of airing 8 hours of Palin propaganda. I know that there are a few people out there who still want to believe that Palin is not running, but she didn’t do this reality show for her health. She did the show to reinforce her 2008 image with Republican primary voters, but the truth is that Sarah Palin’s Alaska is about as real as the wig on her head and the Botox in her face.

Everything about Sarah Palin is a fraud and a lie including her soon to bomb reality show. If you want to see something even more sanitized and boring than Sarah Palin’s Real American Heroes on Fox News was, by the way, we’re still waiting for Fox News to get up the courage to air episode two of that train wreck, then you’ll probably be one of the five Americans who will tune in to TLC to watch Palin.

If you are like the rest of us though, you already see right through this cheap attempt at political product placement, and click right on past Sister Sarah’s latest money making scam. Hopefully, TLC wasn’t foolish enough to pay her in advance. If so, she may quit by episode 4, and Sean Parnell’s Alaska will have to fill out the rest of the run.

Political Propaganda Meets Reality TV in Sarah Palin’s Alaska was written by Guest Contributor for PoliticusUSA.
© PoliticusUSA, Oct. 19th, 2010. All Rights Reserved

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