Press should be vigorous in investigating candidates

Believe it or not, some people are criticizing the press for its handling of the Sarah Palin story, and we have had grousing about that, some counterpunches being thrown, with no concession of petty pursuits or double standards.

Joe Klein of Time seems especially peeved. He tells us a Republican operative is aiming to "slime the press" with allegations of "unfair" and "personal" assaults on the vice presidential candidate, and hopes his "colleagues stand strong" in the face of this outrageous meanness.

And columnist Roger Simon says politicians at the GOP convention just wanted the media to cheer their decisions and forego basic questions.

Simon's surely right, but the same is true of all politicians everywhere, all the time, both Democratic and Republican, liberal and conservative, and not just in the case of John McCain's picking Palin to run with him on the Republican ticket. Let's reflect for a second on the Obama campaign's efforts to shut up and vilify Stanley Kurtz.

Kurtz, whose pieces appear in such publications as the Wall Street Journal and National Review, has been investigating the relationship of Barack Obama and William Ayers, the Illinois professor who is an unrepentant Weatherman bomber of the 1960s and '70s. Published reports tell how Obama supporters inundated a radio station with phone calls and e-mails in an effort to stop an interview with Kurtz, and accused him of "baseless fear-mongering." It was "intimidating," a radio producer said.

Some of Kurtz's digging seems to have disclosed possibilities that Obama was tighter with Ayers than was previously known, but mainstream media have paid scant attention to this story, apparently fearing the implication of guilt by slight association, and maybe because you just don't cast suspicion of any kind on Saint Obama. Only aggressive reporting can determine how slight the association was, of course, and we've had a dearth of that on Obama.

High in a story on the front page of The New York Times, it was reported that Palin's husband was convicted of drunk driving 22 years ago, and we have had endless, personally intrusive, even trashy attention paid to the irrelevancy that Palin has a pregnant daughter who has not yet -- but soon will -- marry the father. What we are not now getting is very intensive press exploration about Obama's $1.65 million house and the peculiar circumstances of its purchase, his non-accomplishments as a community organizer or his see-no-evil days in the company of Chicago politicians sometimes rumored to tread where they shouldn't.

For a study in press double standards, you could do little better than to look at the grave journalistic concern now being expressed about whether Palin once attended a meeting in her town of the seemingly innocent if kooky Alaskan Independence Party, and the virtual press neglect four years ago of whether presidential candidate John Kerry had attended a 1971 Kansas City meeting at which members of the radical Vietnam Veterans Against War voted on whether to assassinate pro-war members of the Senate.

Kerry first said he had not been there, but it turned out there were a half dozen witnesses and FBI documents saying he was, and he then conceded that maybe he had been in town at some point but still had no recollection of the occasion. The press reaction in effect was, "Oh, so what?," because, among other things, the initial allegation had come from the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, and the a priori press line was that their allegations were false, even though several of them have been proven true. (By the way, witnesses said Kerry opposed the assassination plan, which was defeated in a vote, and he did quit the group about that time.)

Without question, reporters should pursue the details of Palin's public career; she is a fresh face and there is much to learn about whether she is qualified to be a heartbeat away from the presidency. But some in the press are now going overboard, and her acceptance speech is already one piece of evidence that she is a gifted leader.

(Jay Ambrose, formerly Washington director of editorial policy for Scripps Howard newspapers and the editor of dailies in El Paso, Texas, and Denver, is a columnist living in Colorado. He can be reached at SpeaktoJay(at)aol.com.)