Matt Drudge's high ethical standards

More on the Obama "madrassa" story: the Washington Times distances itself from a sister publication and even Drudge wouldn't pick it up.

WASHINGTON, Jan. 28 — Jeffrey T. Kuhner, whose Web site published the first anonymous smear of the 2008 presidential race, is hardly the only editor who will not reveal his reporters’ sources. What sets him apart is that he will not even disclose the names of his reporters.

But their anonymity has not stopped them from making an impact. In the last two weeks, Mr. Kuhner’s Web site, Insight, the last remnant of a defunct conservative print magazine owned by the Unification Church led by the Rev. Sun Myung Moon, was able to set off a wave of television commentary, talk-radio chatter, official denials, investigations by journalists around the globe and news media self-analysis that has lasted 11 days and counting.

The controversy started with a quickly discredited Jan. 17 article on the Insight Web site asserting that the presidential campaign of Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton was preparing an accusation that her rival, Senator Barack Obama, had covered up a brief period he had spent in an Islamic religious school in Indonesia when he was 6.

(Other news organizations have confirmed Mr. Obama’s descriptions of the school as a secular public school. Both senators have denounced the report, and there is no evidence that Mrs. Clinton’s campaign planned to spread those accusations.)

In an interview Sunday, Mr. Kuhner, 37, said he still considered the article, which he said was meant to focus on the thinking of the Clinton campaign, to be “solid as solid can be.” But he declined to say whether he had learned the identity of his reporter’s sources, and so perhaps only that reporter knows the origin of the article’s anonymous quotes and assertions. Its assertions about Mr. Obama resemble rumors passed on without evidence in e-mail messages that have been widely circulated over the last several weeks.

David Kirkpatrick's story does illuminate one important piece of information -- that this smear was intended to undermine the Clinton campaign more than the Obama run. And despite Obama's and Clinton's fast response to get out in front of this latest attack (I won't call it "swiftboating," since with those guys, at least they weren't anonymous), I think over time these stories about "the thinking of the Clinton campaign" will have it's effect. After all, it's fairly easy for Obama to prove the fact that he wasn't Osama bin Laden's star pupil, but it will be much harder for the Clinton campaign to disprove a suspicion that she plays dirty. Already, the mainstream press doesn't shy away from calling her ruthless, ambitious (as if there are any politicians anywhere in the world who aren't by definition, "ambitious"), and, of course, knife-wielding. It won't take all that much for stories like these to register in the voters' minds that Clinton regularly engages in dirty tricks against her opponents.

The other place, I think, where Kirkpatrick decides not to tread is just what this indicates:

To most journalists, the notion of anonymous reporters relying on anonymous sources is a red flag. “If you want to talk about a business model that is designed to manufacture mischief in large volume, that would be it,” said Ralph Whitehead Jr., a professor of journalism at the University of Massachusetts.

With so much anonymity, “How do we know that Insight magazine actually exists?” Professor Whitehead added. “It could be performance art.”

But hosts of morning television programs and an evening commentator on the Fox News Network nevertheless devoted extensive discussion to Insight’s Clinton-Obama article, as did Rush Limbaugh and other conservative talk radio hosts.

MSNBC, too, has been known to pick up Insight's "reporting" of stories that made the Bush administration look bad, but clearly, there is an informal operation going on here: Insight to Fox to Limbaugh to the rest of the talk radio bloviators. Kudos to Drudge for not assuming his usual role; maybe someone on his staff was sick.