Today there were many news stories about Sarah Palin joining in the effort to impeach Barack Obama. It's on the basis of not protecting the borders or something. Most of the articles I read were rather flippant in dismissing the campaign and Palin's participation in it as silly and futile.
Much as I hate Palin, my first reaction was that the articles were unprofessional. I have an old-school approach to news, that outside of any articles clearly marked as opinion, you just keep to the facts.
But now I wonder how realistic that is. I've noticed that my less-politically-aware friends often miss subtleties about which happenings are important, and which are the silly things everyone is laughing at. For instance, If you just report that there's going to be an attempt to impeach the president, they have no way of knowing it's a long-shot effort that's mainly a publicity stunt. So you could argue that tongue-in-cheek reporting on this story conveys more information.
A way out of this journalistic quandary would be to quote someone opposed to Palin. This quoted person would deliver the sarcastic put-down illustrating the desperation of the impeachment call. But the problem is that: first, the journalist is just handing-off the dirty work to someone else, and secondly, there will always be someone willing to offer supportive or dismissive quotes on any given action. For instance, let's say Palin had broken from her bombastic style and called for a bipartisan effort to find a pragmatic compromise on immigration reform. You could easily find a politician willing to offer a quote calling her statement delusional and far-fetched. So perhaps my high-minded principles of unbiased reporting are naive in today's hyper-politicized world.
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