>Hey Walter,
>
>>>She promoted old friends to posts and made life difficult for enemies? Gasp! Holy Moly, no one does that!
>>
>>Does this make it right?
>
>Depends on your definition of "right". Elected officials have always put friends and associates in their cabinets because they know and trust them. It's the way the world works. Again, I don't see where this is so unique to Palin that it qualifies as news.

Again. Does this make it right?

I know it often works that way, however up here we are a lot less accepting this. If a politician had done such thing up here, it would move him/her into a very difficult position, esspecially when it is a high ranked politician.

>>I can recall something similar started from the republicans as soon as they heard Hillary would be running up for presidency about 4 years ago. Special interest sites were launced to start a campaign to stop hillary. I can't remember any republican up here complaining about that. This is exactly the same.

>Yes, you're right. But those groups didn't wrap themselves around the mantle of journalism. The attacks on Palin are coming from MSNBC, CNN, and other supposedly objective news organizations.

Maybe, but I doubt that this does make much of a difference to joe average. Anyways, the situation is different. In the case of hillary it was the goal of collecting all things that could be used against her with the explicit intention to hurt her. If they would have found something, they certainly would have passed that to the mass media such as Fox. In the case of palin something was found, in the process to find out who she really is, that was newsworthy and they published it.

Up here we would have done the same thing. Find out who someone is and published the same facts, though the personal opions might have been less political biased. After all, it is news that is worthy to publish. Personally I think the media has the obligation to do this. So let me ask you. If a newspaper gets such type of information about a candidate, left or right, should it ignore that, or verify and publish that? This is extremely important.

If you say, they should not publish that, it indicates you're not a forestander of independed media.

Personally I think the media has the obligation to publish any facts and only the interpretation or opinion is allowed to be coloured, though I prefer to see no opinions fabricated by the newspaper themselves, but only the ones from 3rd parties. So, IMO, whether this is an attack can only be concluded from the parts of the article that can be classified as opinion or unverifyable statements, not the facts themselves.