Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Sarah Palin Interviews with Katie Couric


 * The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review).  No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was   no consensus. While there is a blatantly clear consensus that the article should not be deleted, there is not a clear consensus neither for keep nor for merge. —  Aitias  // discussion 17:45, 14 January 2009 (UTC)

Sarah Palin Interviews with Katie Couric

 * ( [ delete] ) – (View AfD) (View log)

A single interview of a political candidate, not notable in and of itself. Material should be merged into John McCain presidential campaign, 2008 or Public image and reception of Sarah Palin. Kelly hi! 17:46, 10 January 2009 (UTC)


 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Politics-related deletion discussions.   --  brew  crewer  (yada, yada) 17:55, 10 January 2009 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of News-related deletion discussions.   --  brew  crewer  (yada, yada) 17:55, 10 January 2009 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of United States of America-related deletion discussions.   --  brew  crewer  (yada, yada) 17:55, 10 January 2009 (UTC)
 * Strong Keep -- the Katie Couric interviews were the definitive news interviews from the 2008 US presidential election. In terms of journalism, these will be featured in case studies for generations and I believe will be studied as thoroughly as the Frost/Nixon interviews. No other interviews were nearly as influential as the Couric/Palin ones and Palin is still talking about it! --The lorax (talk) 17:58, 10 January 2009 (UTC)
 * Strong Keep exhaustive research on this page, well referenced. Sense that this is a WP:DONTLIKE argument. travb (talk) 18:32, 10 January 2009 (UTC)
 * Delete Although the interviews were bad enough to get news attention, they are not notable enough to have their own articles. Per the nom, there are several potential articles this info could be mentioned in (also, "Interviews" should not be capitalized).  TJ   Spyke   18:41, 10 January 2009 (UTC)
 * Keep - Clips from this interview were played for months on several major news channels during the campaign. They achieved their own notability and the article appears to do a good job describing it.
 * Weak keep. This is probably notable and referenced enough to be kept here, but the article itself needs massive copy-editing; as it stands it's quite confusing and uninformative. If it cannot be made encyclopedic, it should be deleted. Noir (talk) 19:21, 10 January 2009 (UTC)
 * Keep -- While I can understand the rationale for the merge argument, there are two things that persuade me that keeping is better -- 1) there is enough information available about this singularly famous incident for a coherent and focused article, enough in fact that it would be excessive as a subsection, and 2) it's easier to find as a separate article, rather than as a subsection. Plenty of people look for information on this incident.  Antandrus  (talk) 19:25, 10 January 2009 (UTC)
 * Merge. Series of interviews that are simply part of Presidential campaign and are related with public image of Sarah Palin. The interviews and following media tete-a-tete might be a good material at Wikinews, but has no historical notability here. That the interviews might be studied and are equivalent to Frost/Nixon interviews is an irrelevant and unsubstantiated argument here. Leave  Sleaves  19:54, 10 January 2009 (UTC)
 * Weak keep My first impression was that this information can adequately be merged to the articles about the 2008 campaign, as well as those for Sarah Palin and Katie Couric. However, I tend to agree that this will be studied by both politicians and journalists in the future, and that this page provides a level of detail that would not be appropriate in the other articles.
 * Merge into the two existing articles, keeping all the citations. Let's not just suppress this.--Wetman (talk) 21:02, 10 January 2009 (UTC)
 * Keep I have previously said to delete on all the breakout articles on Palin. In this particular one though, the series of interviews was itself notable as series of interviews, and has been commented on as such, extensively, even after the campaign.  DGG (talk) 21:28, 10 January 2009 (UTC)
 * Delete -this should be merged. doesn't merit its own article. Ltwin (talk) 23:08, 10 January 2009 (UTC)
 * Weak merge. I think this is more of a content-structuring issue than an AfD issue, but my view of how to best structure the content would be as a sub-section of a more general campaign article, analogously to how we handle, say, the famous 1960 Nixon-Kennedy debates. --Delirium (talk) 23:14, 10 January 2009 (UTC)
 * Yeah, I would think the best way would be to make a section in John McCain presidential campaign, 2008. Kelly  hi! 23:16, 10 January 2009 (UTC)
 * Merge into campaign article. Single event. Little solid content. Not actually looked at much either. Collect (talk) 23:20, 10 January 2009 (UTC)
 * Weak merge into either the presidential campaign or public image articles Sceptre (talk) 23:21, 10 January 2009 (UTC)
 * Merge Can be merged directly into either the Sarah Palin public image or McCain campaign articles. Hekerui (talk) 01:00, 11 January 2009 (UTC)
 * Keep The interviews should be mentioned in the two articles being proposed as merge targets, but there's enough to say about the topic to also merit a focused, independent article. At present, this article doesn't even say that much about the content of the interviews, so there's a lot of room for expansion. Zagalejo^^^ 04:36, 11 January 2009 (UTC)
 * No vote, just information to be considered : None of the citations from the page, as it stands now, are on the Sarah Palin page and they really shouldn't be on the John McCain page if they were. That includes:
 * 1."New York Times television critic Alessandra Stanley described the interview as "disastrous" to the McCain/Palin campaign." -On SNL It's the Real Sarah Palin, Looking Like a Real Entertainer, by Alessandra Stanley, October 20, 2008, New York Times" 2. http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=OGIwNTU1OWJkOTYyYTVkYmMyNGFkNjZhOTQwM2FkMDI= 3. http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=4490713n : Couric Interview. 4. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-95wkCMeUkk Interview with Palin, from 'Media Malpractice' 5. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RfV8U16OkL0 Couric on Letterman show. The CBS video in particular is priceless, as it is the actual interview in question.
 * The current standard of writing on that section of the Sarah Palin page is poor. "Among the news organizations that criticized the restrictions were Palin's first major interview, with Charles Gibson of ABC News, met with mixed reviews.[150] Her interview five days later with Fox News's Sean Hannity focused on many of the same questions from Gibson's interview.[151] However, Palin's performance in her third interview, with Katie Couric of CBS News, was widely criticized; her poll numbers declined, Republicans expressed concern that she was becoming a political liability, and some conservative commentators called for Palin to resign from the Presidential ticket.[152][153]"
 * Note that there are no actual cites for the Couric interview, and two reactions from the conservative commentators. I think I might actually prefer that this page gets deleted and the Sarah Palin page gets made better, but we must have at least one meaningful articulation of this story. Anarchangel (talk) 05:48, 11 January 2009 (UTC)
 * 'Links to this page' on "Sarah Palin interviews with Katie Couric" shows the SP article linking to SPiwKC, but using ctrl-f to search for 'Sarah Palin interviews with Katie Couric' in the edit field shows nothing. I hypothesize this is because SPiwKC was once one of the SP collection of articles, and had that infobox on its page, which has somehow disappeared, possibly because of the name change move to lowercase 'interview'? Anarchangel (talk) 19:01, 12 January 2009 (UTC)


 * Merge - Merge into existing articles. While Palins interviews as a whole are notable, I don't believe an individual article on each interview is appropriate. Dman727 (talk) 07:00, 11 January 2009 (UTC)
 * Strong Keep as a defining moment of the election. The fact that this relates to several other articles about the campaign strengthens the case for improving this article, and adding brief summary syle items in the related articles, each with a link to this as the main article. . dave souza, talk 12:32, 11 January 2009 (UTC)
 * Strong keep Per Dave souza.  Also, in a few years when Palin considers running again, we don't have to expend the effort to rewrite this article.  At any rate, it was the turning point for conservative support for her--most of the intellectual and educated conservatives abandoned support for her after this interview.   Orange Marlin  Talk• Contributions 16:17, 11 January 2009 (UTC)
 * Keep and expand. The interviews were iconic. Regards. FangedFaerie  ( Talk  |  Edits ) 16:46, 11 January 2009 (UTC)
 * Comment: wow, look at the article now! Regards. FangedFaerie  ( Talk  |  Edits ) 21:28, 12 January 2009 (UTC)


 * Comment The interview was certainly notable at the time, so I think the question is whether we're enough away from the event yet to determine whether it's "historically notable" or "a historical footnote". Aesthetically the article seems pretty shabby (to my eyes), but that's neither here nor there. -- SB_Johnny | talk  16:55, 11 January 2009 (UTC)
 * Keep and expand. "certainly notable at the time"? wtf?  &#0149;Jim 62 sch&#0149; dissera! 19:12, 11 January 2009 (UTC)
 * Hey, just sayin... ya know? :-) -- SB_Johnny | talk  00:13, 12 January 2009 (UTC)
 * keep Once notable always notable. We are talking about a series of interviews which arguably changed the result of the United States Presidential election. We have a massive amount of material on these interviews which is reliably sourced. That material does cannot reasonably go in the main Palin article or other Palin related articles. So it goes here. JoshuaZ (talk) 20:10, 11 January 2009 (UTC)
 * Keep. A merger of all this information into one of the suggested articles (McCain campaign or Palin image) would be clutter, giving too much detail about this one event.  A merger of less than all the information would expunge from Wikipedia material about a significant aspect of both those topics.  I agree with the comment by Delirium that this is more an issue of how to structure our campaign coverage.  Nevertheless, despite Delirium's example of the 1960 debate being only a section in that campaign article, we have a separate article about the United States presidential election debates, 2004.  We tend to have more information about recent (internet-era) events than older ones.  The general principles of article organization are the same -- give a summary of reasonable length, and if there's more detail then set it forth in daughter articles.  The article now up for AfD is, in effect, a lengthy content footnote to the other articles. JamesMLane t c 20:29, 11 January 2009 (UTC)
 * Keep. I won't go as far as JoshuaZ in that these interviews changed the result of the election (the financial crisis took care of that), but it was definitely a pivotal moment in the public's perception of Sarah Palin. This interview is probably the most debated of all interviews which took place during the campaign. Sjakkalle (Check!)  11:53, 12 January 2009 (UTC)
 * comment I did say "arguably" not that I necessarily agreed with the argument just that it has some reasonable plausibility. JoshuaZ (talk) 19:23, 12 January 2009 (UTC)
 * Merge or Expand scope. There's no valid reason to have such a narrowly focussed article.  Palin did other interviews, such as the very closely watched interview with Charlie Gibson, during the 2008 campaign.  It seems like focussing exclusively on the Couric interviews isn't neutral, since they were widely viewed as a huge flop for Palin, either due to her shortcomings or due to the interview tactics of Couric.  Meanwhile, other interviews with Palin were viewed as much more helpful to Palin.  We could have separate Wikipedia articles on the Couric interview, the Gibson interview, the SNL appearance, the convention speech, the visit to the bathroom in Oshkosh, the clothing purchases, the jogging in Missoula, the wink during the debate, et cetera.  But let's not.Ferrylodge (talk) 21:15, 13 January 2009 (UTC)
 * Comment. Ferrylodge, if the article were merged into the McCain campaign article, would you merge all the information, or expunge some of it from Wikipedia? JamesMLane t c 05:39, 14 January 2009 (UTC)
 * Keep. Sometimes a focal point article like this can illustrate American political reality better than a large, sprawling treatment like John McCain presidential campaign, 2008 can.  These interviews were also the likely high water mark of Couric's career at CBS, and are thus significant with respect to her as well as to Palin.  Wasted Time R (talk) 03:15, 14 January 2009 (UTC)
 * We'll agree about something someday. :-)Ferrylodge (talk) 03:31, 14 January 2009 (UTC)


 * Merge with Public image and reception of Sarah Palin article because of the rather limited scope of this article alone. Palin also did interviews with ABC's Charles Gibson and Fox's Sean Hannity, and I think both got some press reception, so Palin's interviews with each anchor should be covered in that article. --Andrewlp1991 (talk) 06:52, 14 January 2009 (UTC)


 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.