CNN's Sanchez P'wned by the LA Times

Amanda Carpenter | October 15, 2008 10:15 AM

CNN reporter Rick Sanchez got called out by the LA Times today for trying to gin up a story about Sarah Palin's ties to the Alaskan Independence Party.

Sanchez's report is HERE, but you can save yourself the time and just read

James Rainey's critique of it, the best of which is excerpted below:

Rather than deliver a single revelation, the 24-hour cable news channel coughed up a reheated, overwrought and misleading story that seemed designed to yoke Sarah Palin and her husband to the most extreme secessionists in Alaska...CNN centered Tuesday's report on an interview with Salon.com reporter David Neiwert, who acknowledged that Sarah Palin never belonged to the party and that her husband joined but "wasn't active at all." That didn't stop the cable network and anchor Sanchez from front-loading its report with outrageous pronouncements from AIP founder Joe Vogler, now deceased. "The fires of hell are frozen glaciers compared to my hatred for the American government," Old Joe, as he was known, once said. "And I won't be buried under their damn flag." Sounds a little like Barack Obama's old pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. Yet, to my knowledge, no direct connection between Vogler and Gov. Palin has been reported.