Palin–Couric interviews

The Sarah Palin Interviews with Katie Couric were a series of interviews of the 2008 Republican Party US Vice Presidential nominee Sarah Palin conducted by CBS Evening News anchor Katie Couric. They were recorded and broadcast on television in several programs before the 2008 US presidential election. Couric received the Walter Cronkite Award for Journalism Excellence for the interview.

The interviews were widely believed to have been a disaster for Palin's image and for the McCain Campaign, and were cited by many as the cause of a turning of the tide of public opinion against her.

Origins

The Couric interview was preceded by heavy media scrutiny over the McCain campaign's alleged unwillingness to allow press access to Palin. According to senior McCain staffer, Nicolle Wallace, “We had no input on usage...we had no ground rules on the interview. I think that’s pretty unprecedented. A lot of people negotiate platforms. We didn’t negotiate platforms or air dates.”

"We were initially supposed to interview her—sit down with her in Philadelphia on Sunday and travel with Senator McCain and Governor Palin on that Monday," Couric recalled. "And then the campaign felt they didn't want a week to go by without hearing anything from Governor Palin because they were doling out the interviews very selectively. So they decided when she was visiting some world leaders at the UN, that that would be an opportunity for her to sit down that morning and talk to me and it was very serendipitous for us, because we could—that opened the door to a lot of interesting foreign policy questions. And, also, in addition to that, the financial crisis was sort of really heating up during that week, so that was another opportunity. Then, we had scheduled an interview the following Monday, during which we were going to talk about a lot of domestic and social issues, so they gave us tremendous access."

Newsweek reported that at time of the Couric interview, Palin felt that she had been overmanaged for her first one-on-one debut with a network anchor, Charlie Gibson of ABC and "rebuffed Wallace's help with her Couric interview." McCain advisers said that Palin "did not have the time or focus to prepare for the interview." "She did not say, 'I will not prepare,'” a McCain adviser said. "She just didn’t have a bandwidth to do a mock interview session the way we had prepared before. She was just overloaded."

Format

CBS News producers segmented key moments from the interviews over the course of several days and on multiple formats, including The Early Show, the Evening News, and the internet. The New York Observer noted that this "prolonged the interviews’ saliency in the news cycle," and Bill Kristol, a Fox News Channel commentator, referred to the network's seemingly never-ending installments as a “nine-thousand-part interview.”

The initial 40-minute session aired September 24 and 25, 2008. Palin and Couric discussed Rick Davis and the economy. Palin defended her comments on how Alaska's proximity to Russia enhanced her foreign policy experience:

COURIC: Explain to me why that enhances your foreign policy credentials.

PALIN: Well, it certainly does because our-- our next door neighbors are foreign countries. They're in the state that I am the executive of. And there in Russia--

COURIC: Have you ever been involved with any negotiations, for example, with the Russians?

PALIN: We have trade missions back and forth. We-- we do-- it's very important when you consider even national security issues with Russia as Putin rears his head and comes into the air space of the United States of America, where-- where do they go? It's Alaska. It's just right over the border. It is-- from Alaska that we send those out to make sure that an eye is being kept on this very powerful nation, Russia, because they are right there. They are right next to-- to our state.

Fallout

The interviews aired on CBS Evening News showed ratings increases on both nights and clips posted on YouTube garnered more than 10 million views. National Review editor Rich Lowry called Palin's performance in the interview "dreadful." The New York Times television critic Alessandra Stanley described the interview as "in some ways [...] the worst" interview Palin had done. The exchange on Russia was "startling," her answer "surprisingly wobbly." While it's "perhaps understandable" that Palin "felt nervous," it still "wasn’t a reassuring performance". Beliefnet's Rod Dreher wrote that he was "well and truly embarrassed" for Palin. She's "a good woman who might well be a great governor of Alaska," but this was a "train wreck." The interviews were later parodied by Tina Fey on Saturday Night Live. In the sketch, Fey quoted verbatim one of Palin's answers from the actual interview. The airing of the Couric interviews coincided with "a collapse in her approval ratings and a loss of McCain's gains among white women."

In the immediate aftermath of the interview, Palin voiced irritation she had with Couric's interview. "The Sarah Palin in those interviews was a little bit annoyed," she said. "It's like, man, no matter what you say, you are going to get clobbered."

According to campaign manager Rick Davis, Palin thought the questions would be softer than they were: "She was under the impression the Couric thing was going to be easier than it was. Everyone’s guard was down for the Couric interview." "I knew it didn’t go well the first day, and then we gave her a couple of other segments after that," Palin said in a retrospective with conservative filmmaker John Ziegler on the Couric interview. "My question to the campaign was, after it didn’t go well the first day, why were we going to go back for more? Because of however it works in that upper echelon of power brokering, in the media and with spokespersons, it was told [to] me, yeah, we’re going to go back for more. And going back for more was not a wise decision, either."

After the election, Couric appeared on The Late Show with David Letterman and discussed her interviews with Palin, especially in regards to her question on what newspapers or magazines she read to "stay informed and to understand the world":

"I’m not sure whether she was afraid to offend certain people, by, she would offend conservatives by saying she read The New York Times," Couric said.

"Or people who don’t read," Letterman joked. "She was afraid of offending people who don’t read. Maybe that was it."

"Even in the post-election interviews, Dave, that she's done, nobody has really asked her 'why didn't you answer that question?'" Couric added.

Palin directly responded to that question in Ziegler's interview, "Because, Katie, you're not the center of everybody's universe, maybe that's why they didn't think to ask that question among so many other things to be asked. To me the question was more along the lines of: Do you read? What do you guys do up there? What is it that you read? And perhaps I was just too flippant in my answer back to her..."

Ziegler has called the awarding of the Walter Cronkite award to Couric an "outrage.""What really happened here is that Katie Couric showed Governor Palin that she had an agenda on the abortion issue," Ziegler said. "She kept coming back to it time and time again, obviously trying to trap Governor Palin into saying something stupid or extreme. Everything after that has to be seen in the context of that episode, because Governor Palin never trusted Katie Couric after that. It is very, very obvious that Katie Couric had an agenda and that she is being rewarded for having pursued that agenda."

On the other hand, former presidential candidate Mike Huckabee defended Couric, "Now I must say I did not think that...the Katie Couric interviews were unfair. In fact, if anything, Katie Couric was extraordinarily gentle, even helpful. [Palin] just...I don't know what happened. I can't explain it. It was not a good interview. I'm being charitable."