Secret keeping

Well, for one thing, it's a press release. Which is, you know, a conduit through which you would like the information you place there to become public and widely distributed. So you can see how that might happen once you... oh nevermind.

Of course, it’s not unusual for politicians to tussle with journalists who cover them. The candid correspondence of many officeholders is likely filled with similar invective toward the press.

But Palin’s emails show that she also was conscious of what was being written about her in new media platforms such as blogs.

In a January 2008 exchange with some of her aides, she fretted about an anonymous blogger who seemed to have access to her administration’s press releases and was using them to criticize her policies.

“Makes me sick to my stomach,” Palin wrote. “How would this blogger have received the emailed presser unless he’s a valid media person (and why would a legit media person bother to be a regular blogger?), or one of our folks sent it to him?”

Palin aide Frank Bailey informed her that it would be easy for a “mole” to get on her press release distribution list. “They probably just emailed and asked to get on it,” Bailey wrote. (It’s not clear from the emails if the Administration ever learned the blogger’s identity.)