FT.com / US / Politics & Foreign policy - Tea Party gets tough with foes in media: "Even Fox News, for which Ms Palin is now a paid contributor, has on occasions caused embarrassment. Earlier this year, in an interview with Glenn Beck, the talk-radio tycoon, Ms Palin was unable to name one Founding Father, despite constantly invoking them in her speeches. “Well all of them,” she said after a long pause, “because they came collectively together with so much diversity in terms of belief.” On being pressed, Ms Palin alighted on George Washington.
Partly as a result, most Tea Party candidates in this election are avoiding outlets other than Fox News and sympathetic radio stations and internet sites.
“We do get advice not to do interviews and not to be overly candid,” Rand Paul, the Tea Party-supported Senate candidate in Kentucky, admitted to Fox News recently.
In a debate last week Ms O’Donnell, who is considered unlikely to win her race, taunted Wolf Blitzer, the CNN moderator, over the fact that she had turned down his interview requests. Then, in an echo of Ms Palin, who appears to be a role model, she teased Chris Coons, her Democratic opponent, by saying: “You’re just jealous you haven’t appeared on Saturday Night Live.”
Ms O’Donnell’s only national interviews have been with Fox News. But even they appear to have been curtailed. In her last one, two weeks ago, she wasasked about her “plan for Pakistan”.
Referring to it as a Middle Eastern country, Ms O’Donnell said the US should work to create democracy there. Then she praised Pervez Musharraf, the country’s last military dictator. “Pakistan was a great ally for us in the war on terror,” she said. “We have to help them get back to where they were.”
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