When audio surfaced of Bristol Palin tearfully describing a man seizing her by the feet and calling her a “c—” CNN’s Carol Costello introduced the tape this way:
“Sit back and enjoy.”
Costello struggled to contain her glee, eagerly telling viewers, “I’m just going to come right out and say it. This is quite possibly the best minute and a half of audio we’ve ever come across…”
“So we were in a limo,” Bristol can be heard saying in a distraught voice on the tape, “I walk back up. “Did you push my sister?” And some guy gets up, pushes me down on the grass, drags me across the grass. “You slut, you f—ing c—, you f—ing this.” I get back up, he pushes me down on the grass again. And he pulls me by my f—ing feet. And he’s the one that’s leaving and I have my 5-year-old, they took my $300 sunglasses, they took my f—ing shoes, and I’m f—ing just left here?”
Costello has since apologized for her handling of the story, telling Politico, “Over the past few days I have been roundly criticized for joking about a brawl involving the Palin family. In retrospect, I deserve such criticism and would like to apologize.” She will not, according to Breitbart, be apologizing on air.
MSNBC hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski also apologized for their similar behavior after the Daily Caller’s Matt Lewis wrote a passionate article denouncing their hypocrisy.
“Anyone who is concerned about a ‘war on women’ — but not disturbed by this report — is clearly biased,” Lewis declared.
“The more we learned about what happened its clearer that it’s not that funny,” Brzezinski later said. “We played into stereotypes from maybe our own outlook, quite frankly. So it’s definitely more of a story than that.”
Conservative writers like Lewis have pointed out multiple instances of callous reports on the Bristol incident from liberal-leaning news sites. Gawker led their story by sarcastically describing “drunk Bristol Palin” and later noting that she supposedly told the police she didn’t want them to take pictures of her injuries since “There’s nothing on my face except for beer and makeup.”
The exact events of that evening are still in dispute. No one was ever charged in the incident. Bristol Palin wrote an emotional blog post about the fight and the media’s reaction, insisting reports of her “swinging” at the man in the brawl were false.
“After this incident, I still had a perfect manicure on all ten of my nails,” she wrote. “Plus – I’m left handed. I wouldn’t even begin to know how to begin “swinging” at someone.”
She tore into the journalists who have been mocking her: “In the meantime, I was pushed and held down by some guy… and the media salivates like a dog that’s just been given a bone.”
Ultimately what actually happened that night is irrelevant, for the purposes of this particular controversy. Journalists can’t have it both ways. If people like George Will are monsters for suggesting that women ever exaggerate reports of assault, Bristol Palin deserves the same kid-glove treatment they would afford a liberal woman–no matter how amusingly drunk she might have been.
Watch the video of Costello’s segment below, via the Daily Caller:
