Before Sarah Palin’s book, “Going Rogue,” was released to the public, the Associated Press published a much-heralded fact check that detailed where her claims didn’t line up with reality. It was possible in part because the AP snagged a copy of Palin’s book early.
There’s a lot to how the AP found the books – and beat their competitors – detailed in a weekly internal newsletter to the company’s 4,000 employees and obtained by Talking Points Memo.
Mike Oreskes, a senior managing editor, offers staffers a description of the AP’s own work tracking down and fact checking the book and it reads like a spy thriller:
“The AP was determined to get the first copy,” Oreskes wrote, detailing how the writers learned a store had “inadvertently placed the book on sale five days before its official Nov. 17 release date.”
“They bought a copy, ripped it from its spine and scanned it into the system so it could be read and electronically searched,” he wrote. “A NewsNow moved within 40 minutes, followed quickly by multiple leads as details were gleaned from the 413-page manuscript.”
Name any other book that the AP pursued with such gusto in its history.
They didn’t want the story. They wanted to get to discrediting her as quickly as possible, plain and simple.