By Jay Ambrose
Scripps Howard News Service

Here's what you do if you want an immediate demonstration of media bias in political coverage and to see trap doors open on the heads of leftists throughout the land as little birds step out singing, ``Cuckoo, cuckoo, cuckoo." You speak the name of Sarah Palin and let it be known she's traveling about the land saying stuff.

The former Alaskan governor and VP candidate has got a book out now and has been on TV talking to Oprah Winfrey and some Fox News hosts, and how in the name of all that's liberal can that be allowed? The Associate Press, by golly, wasn't going to sit still for this, and therefore sicked 11 employees on the her autobiography, all the better to do some fact-checking, to get the goods on this conservative creature.

Fact-checks ― heaven save us from their misuse. It's a growing fad among journalists to suppose that major controversies can be reduced to whether discreet pieces of information are right or wrong, as if context and complexity and all kinds of subtle argumentation do not matter, as if issues of opinion are actually issues of some sort of absolute proof and disproof. What you can't escape noticing is that these fact-checks can become a let's-be-objective disguise for outright editorializing.

The AP piece that I read did in fact have some material Palin has to wish it had not brought up, such as seeming confusion on the major issue of federal bailouts, for instance. But it also uses some highly rhetorical language unsuitable for a straight news report (saying the ``new book reprises familiar claims … that haven't become truer over time") and arrives at a conclusion that is hardly a matter of fact (that the book has all the attributes of a "pre-campaign manifesto.")

So some people asked the AP a question itself ― had it devoted so many people to search out possible error in the autobiographies of other political figures, such as Barack Obama. It did not answer. I've got a guess the answer is ``no," for my impression is that there is not much even-handedness in fact checking among the media outlets I scan. Vice President Joseph Biden's constant flubs seemed to me to get far less attention during the 2008 campaign than Palin's, and when Obama gave a speech to Congress containing a half-dozen big-time errors, I do not recall an AP story telling me his propaganda show on health care had become no truer over time.

I myself do not think Palin a terrific prospect for president, which is different from becoming absolutely hysterical about her, as happened in 2008 among all kinds of people in and out of media and has been happening recently, as when the New York Times' Frank Rich said she and others were ``re-enacting Stalinism in full purge mode." Palin's supposed outrage was to have endorsed a conservative candidate over a liberal Republican in a New York congressional race. As Reason magazine's online site observed, Stalin's Soviet purge included the execution of 1,000 people a day for two years. Rich doesn't see the difference?

Maybe that's not too remarkable. ABC's Charlie Gibson sought to expose Palin's ignorance during the campaign by showing she did not know what the Bush doctrine was, when, as the commentator Charles Krauthammer devastatingly pointed out, Gibson himself did not know what it was.

At some point, I'd like to see some truly well informed interrogators put tough questions to network TV anchors, but that's a thought for another day. Today's thought is that Palin just may have something interesting to offer in the national debate over public policies if she gets fair and reasonable coverage and if the left will rid itself of a rabidity it keeps claiming is the exclusive property of the right.

Jay Ambrose, formerly Washington director of editorial policy for Scripps Howard newspapers and the editor of dailies in El Paso, Texas, and Denver, is a columnist living in Colorado. He can be reached at SpeaktoJay@aol.com.