This morning when I woke up, I checked my email and was intrigued when I got my daily New York Times headlines email. The headline that caught my attention was "Palin Hired Friends and Lashed Foes." I thought to myself, wow all of this hype and skepticism about Palin is really getting old, but I decided to read the article anyways to see what was "uncovered."

The opening line of the article is "Gov. Sarah Palin lives by the maxim that all politics is local, not to mention personal." I don't know if it is just me, but this statement seems very biased and from the beginning it sets the tone of negativity towards Palin. I thought that our news reporters were suppose to be objective, fair, and balanced. It seems that now more than ever, reporters have forgotten the ethics of journalism and just put their opinions at the forefront. Reporters want to put their views on us rather than providing us with he information that we need to make decisions on our own. It is pertinent for all readers to be critical of what reporters write or they will be influenced. You can't believe everything that you read.

This article by Jo Becker, Peter S. Goodman and Michael Powell does go into detail of specific events where Palin may have put old friends in political positions, but maybe those people were qualified. Just because she knew them does not mean that is why she hired them. Alaska is small, and often you do know a lot of people when you live in a small place. However, although there were specific events given, the way that the reporters backed up their findings was just by ending the sentence with "records show" or "records and interviews show." To really back up their statements, these reporters should have included links in this interactive medium so that I could see how they interpreted what they learned from these "records" and "interviews," which are not specified at all.

I can see by reading this article that these reporters attempted to be balanced. They tried to mention successes of Palin, but they would always end the paragraphs with negativity. For example, they wrote that "Ms. Palin has lifted Alaska out of a mire of corruption. She gained the passage of a bill that tightens the rules covering lobbyists. And she rewrote the tax code to capture a greater share of oil and gas sale proceeds." But then a few paragraphs later they go right back into explaining how her personal politics made her corrupt. However, I did not see any concrete explanations to back up their information.

I am not even sure if I am a Sarah Palin fan yet, but I do know that I do not like the way that reporters have been covering her. If they would be fair and balanced then they could probably "uncover" and dig up just as much dirt on Obama, Biden, and McCain, but that is not where the "juiciness" is right now. I am glad that reporters are performing their watchdog role and are trying to inform the public of how our politicians may be corrupt, but I feel that there is definitely a way for reporters to do this by leaving their political bias at the door. Where is all the "dirt" on our other VP candidate Biden?? I am interested in learning more about him.