If an editor has done a wholesale — and I mean nearly total — rewrite, the editor should share a byline. Normal editing doesn’t necessarily mean heavy revision.

Maybe news orgs should emulate the Economist and drop bylines in all but a very few cases…

In any case, note that bylines on actual stories are the name of the reporter, who may have done the work, but whose words have most certainly been heavily revised by the desk in the interests of rendering what is often hastily dictated semi-gibberish as actual prose.

Journalists should not actively participate in fakery.

First of all, you are conflating misappropriation of someone else’s content with paying or otherwise compensating someone to write for you. It’s one thing if I give someone else’s speech or publish someone else’s writing as my own without compensating them in some way, either with credit or with money as the circumstances may call for. Nobody should do that.

But what’s wrong with students (or faculty members) paying someone to write papers for them? Because members of the academic community are judged directly on the content and form of what they write. This is not true for almost anyone else, certainly not for politicians. Allowing students to substitute someone else’s work for their own gums up the evaluation process that is applied to them, and diminishes the value of the credential to anyone else.

If you make a telephone call to an animal-removal company to come and remove a stray gorilla from your house, and you get a letter signed by the president of the company setting out the terms and conditions, does it bother you that this is a form letter composed by some lawyer who may not even work for the company any more? Of course not. What matters is that a representative of the company signed it at the bottom. You judge the letter on its merits as an offer to do business, and accept or reject it as such, not based on the mismatch between the actual author and the signatory.

Likewise, politicians are judged on what policies they adhere to (ultimately, of course, on whether they get votes), not on who expresses those policies in words for them. If the op-ed attributed opinions to Palin she didn’t hold, that would be cause for complaint (not least by Palin!). But if not, then I don’t see the problem with it.