So Clark Hoyt, the nytimes public editor, wrote a good piece about that McCain business in Sunday’s Times. I agree with most of what he writes.

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 asked Jill Abramson, the managing editor for news, if The Times could have done the story and left out the allegation about an affair. “That would not have reflected the essential truth of why the aides were alarmed,” she said.

But what the aides believed might not have been the real truth. And if you cannot provide readers with some independent evidence, I think it is wrong to report the suppositions or concerns of anonymous aides about whether the boss is getting into the wrong bed.

When a newspaper of the Times’ stature goes to press insinuating a sex scandal, you better have hard evidence, and not just a few embittered ex-aids gossiping about their old boss. I get what the editors are saying here – that even if he wasn’t having sex with her, it was still an inappropriate relationship in that McCain in the late 80s essentially took bribes from a special interest, and this woman, who he admits to being “friends” with, and who is not his wife, is a lobbyist. Fine. But the editors should have been more realistic, and not as lazy, about the public’s perception of leading such a damaging story with mere hearsay.

NYTIMES, I love you, but you don’t do yourself any favors in terms of objectivity when you write like this. The lazy reporting just gives conservatives further ammunition to blather on about the paper’s liberal bias. In the future, the paper should practice higher standards when presenting such controversial and potentially damming cases.