A view from the UK

clipped from www.guardian.co.uk Sarah Palin's war against information By avoiding the media and dismissing criticisms as sexist, Sarah Palin hopes to avoid scrutiny of her record Jason Farago It's a war against information. The McCain team knows that if the media do their job and give Palin the same scrutiny that any candidate for high office must endure, she will collapse. Whether that will happen, or whether the press will be cowed by the GOP into doubting its own raison d'être, remains to be seen. Palin will emerge from her televisual purdah at the end of this week, when she'll face Charles Gibson, the ABC anchor who has not won much praise lately for hard-hitting journalism. The Clinton-Obama debate that he moderated (along with George Stephanopoulos) set new standards for vacuity, with nearly an hour devoted to such non-topics as the iconology of flag lapel pins. Rick Hertzberg, the indispensable analyst at the New Yorker, called it "something akin to a federal crime".