I'm Stephen Metcalf, and this is the Slate Culture Gapfest, Resistance is Futile edition.

This is also the daily podcast from Slate.com for Wednesday, September 10th, 2008.

On today's program, we're going to talk about Sarah Palin and the tabloids, Rachel Maddow and the leftward drift of MSNBC, and a quirky new comedy duo called Seinfeld and Gates. Joining me today are Slate's deputy editor, Julia Turner. Hello, Julia. Hi. And our film critic, Dana Stevens, Dana, I feel like I haven't seen you in six months. I know. I missed a gab fest and I'm very sorry about that, but good to be back. Great to have you back. The gang's all here. Sarah Palin, where to even begin. Julia, I think of Sarah Palin as the anti-Tinkerbell. The more we don't believe in her, the more powerful she gets. It seems as though the incredulity that we want to send her way

is finding a lot of resistance from media backlash on the part of the McCain-Palen campaign.

And this leaves room for what, for the tabloids to come in and rumor monger, but also maybe do some

actual journalism. Yeah, there sort of have been two tabloid approaches here in and rumor monger, but also maybe do some actual journalism.

Yeah, there sort of have been two tabloid approaches here. One is that of sort of the People

Magazine and the OK magazine kind of going after the whole Palin family story and chronicling

Sarah Palin's career and her marriage and her kids and her sort of picturesque history of life

in Alaska as the beauty queen who hunts. And then there's actually been sort of picturesque history of life in Alaska as the beauty

queen who hunts. And then there's actually been sort of the investigative side, the National

Inquirer, which of course just recently had its triumph breaking the Edwards affair story,

when after some of the Palin rumors that surfaced right when her candidacy was first announced,

particularly the rumor that was surfacing on a bunch of left wing blogs, that in fact, her youngest child was

really the child of her daughter Bristol, and then she covered it up or was involved in some

kind of huge cover-up. And the inquire, I guess, looked into this story and instead found out

what is now the real story that,

in fact, her daughter Bristol got pregnant out of wedlock and threatened to break, they

claimed to have threatened to break that. And in fact, their threat was the prompt for Palin's

family to announce this pregnancy on the first day of the Republican Convention, which perhaps

wasn't the timing that they would have otherwise chosen, although I suppose they would have had to announce it eventually

because Bristol will be fairly pregnant by the time this election is over.

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