WASHINGTON --An "insidious" Internet myth forced Republican vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin to "out" her daughter as a soon-to-be teenage mother, Tina Brown lamented at the Online News Association today. Brown, who served as editor of Vanity Fair and The New Yorker and who is about to launch on online news aggregation site called The Daily Beast, discussed the pros and cons of the Internet as a news medium in a keynote address to the group. She cited e-mail myths about Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama and Internet-fueled conspiracy theories about the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks before turning her attention to the media feeding frenzy that has surrounded Palin the past two weeks. She specifically decried the false report that Palin faked a pregnancy to cover her daughter's. Liberal blogs like Daily Kos spread that rumor far and wide for what Brown called "propaganda reasons." (Watch the video.) "It went everywhere," Brown said of the smear. "I mean, I was e-mailed that piece by 20 different people. Everybody had that story. And it really forced Sarah Palin, in fact, to kind of out her daughter with her [current] pregnancy." Brown also blamed the media spectacle that ensued after that pregnancy announcement on the initial bogus story. She said Palin was criticized for putting her daughter's pregnancy "on parade" at last week's Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minn. Watch Brown's entire keynote here.
