I somehow doubt they actually are. But the most pro-Palin newspaper in the United Sates right now is the Anchorage Daily News. Although the paper has carried a few recent articles about Palin that are critical, and non-staff local op-eds that are highly critical of the governor, most have been written by Outside or Alaska AP reporters. Their sole editorial in the past two weeks or more that criticized Palin, was the obligatory essay on the Branchflower Report. It damned her for newspeak, not for the misfeasance or malfeasance, which she clearly has committed.
I started asking myself early this week, whether the ADN was preparing the ground for a GOP presidential endorsement, or immunizing the rag from the inevitable criticism they'd get after an Obama-Biden endorsement. The evidence, in my calculation, is mounting for the former.
1 -- The ADN has yet to cover the growing national outrage over the combination of Palin's policy, while mayor of Wasilla, to delete payment for forensic examinations of victims of sexual assault from that city's municipal budget, over her signature, and visible national and statewide outrage over her stance, on hoping to appoint judges who would force women to bear the children of their assailants after having been raped. Their absence on this is quite disturbing.
2 -- Although several national polls, in their details, now document authoritatively how bad Palin has been for the McCain campaign, the ADN hasn't covered this beyond references to articles elsewhere, in their on-line-only Newsreader niche.
3 -- The thoroughly documented connection between the base aspects of Palin's new national base and the sleaziest end-game in a presidential contest since Willie Horton or the 60s worries people, journalists, newspapers and civil rights organizations across the land. Does it bother the editors or publisher of the ADN? Apparently not.
That being said, I suspect at least one or two of the excellent, award-winning writers at the ADN are looking into some of these and other stories about Palin and her husband, being researched as I write, by several non-ADN writers, themselves winners of important awards, or aspiring for their first, covering these matters.