Do Google Penalties Always Follow a Redirects to New Domains?

[PostAlmostAnything]

I have a couple sites that were penalized by Google for hosting content that made Google look bad. After a major newspaper showcased what was going on they suddenly took a major hit as if someone at Google flipped a switch and told their system not to rank the content for anything other than their brand names. The article made Google look bad because the newspaper highlighted a lot of unverified user generated accusations the reporters assumed not to be true in the context of "these accusations are mostly false, but they still show up on the first page when people search Google."

I was thinking one way to fight this would simply be to host the content at a different domain, but I am concerned about the new domain being penalized as well. I don't want to completely shut down all of the original sites because some of them have brand recognition. The oldest domain is 12 years old with backlinks from several news outlets which is why the content ranked so well, but after the penalty that is only the case on Bing.

I've read various articles about this tactic. Some say that you will almost always pass the penalty to the new domain if you do a 301 redirect, but the penalties at issue in those articles were for things like buying links or other black hat tactics. This is somewhat different in that I wasn't doing anything black hat, they just decided not to let the site rank for political reasons. I was hoping that maybe that type of penalty wouldn't follow it, but right now I am leaning towards simply creating a second site to syndicate articles. It will need to attribute the articles to their sources though, so they will need either no followed links or possibly a redirection script that bots cannot follow.

I would really like it if I could simply change the first site to its .net or .org equivalent and 301 everything though.