Say Anything Blog

Good on New York Times ombudsman Clark Hoyt for taking his newspaper, and its editor Bill Keller, to task over that McCain story which alleged that the candidate had an affair with a lobbyist.

The article was notable for what it did not say: It did not say what convinced the advisers that there was a romance. It did not make clear what McCain was admitting when he acknowledged behaving inappropriately — an affair or just an association with a lobbyist that could look bad. And it did not say whether Weaver, the only on-the-record source, believed there was a romance. The Times did not offer independent proof, like the text messages between Detroit’s mayor and a female aide that The Detroit Free Press disclosed recently, or the photograph of Donna Rice sitting on Gary Hart’s lap.

It was not for want of trying. Four highly respected reporters in the Washington bureau worked for months on the story and were pressed repeatedly to get sources on the record and to find documentary evidence like e-mail. If McCain had been having an affair with a lobbyist seeking his help on public policy issues, and The Times had proved it, it would have been a story of unquestionable importance.

But in the absence of a smoking gun, I asked Keller why he decided to run what he had.

“If the point of the story was to allege that McCain had an affair with a lobbyist, we’d have owed readers more compelling evidence than the conviction of senior staff members,” he replied. “But that was not the point of the story. The point of the story was that he behaved in such a way that his close aides felt the relationship constituted reckless behavior and feared it would ruin his career.”

I think that ignores the scarlet elephant in the room. A newspaper cannot begin a story about the all-but-certain Republican presidential nominee with the suggestion of an extramarital affair with an attractive lobbyist 31 years his junior and expect readers to focus on anything other than what most of them did. And if a newspaper is going to suggest an improper sexual affair, whether editors think that is the central point or not, it owes readers more proof than The Times was able to provide.

I couldn’t agree more, and Keller’s claim that the affair accusation “was not the point” is utterly bogus.  As Mr. Hoyt notes above, you do not make an allegation about an extra-marital affair in the second paragraph of a much-hyped story about a Presidential candidate - and even include a picture of the pretty young lobbyist the candidate was supposedly having an affair with right next to the allegations of the affair...

...and then get to say that the affair allegation was not “the point.” It was the point else the Times wouldn’t have made the allegation even as they could come up with scant proof to, you know, prove it.

It seems to me that if this story about McCain’s allegedly unseemly connections to lobbyists were as important as we were lead to believe it was by the folks at the Times they wouldn’t have distracted from it with thinly-sourced allegations about a sex scandal.