To Smear and Smear Again

This is the second story published in the New York Times on an effort by a right wing commentators to stir up conflict between Obama and Clinton over a false claim that Obama attended a radical Muslim school as a child. The story is unusual because smear campaigns like this one sometimes fly under the radar un-sourced but widely distributed over the Internet. The implication is that the Times appears to be determined not to let the genesis of the false story go without exposure to the light of day.

I am not thrilled with Mr. Obama's political disclaimer distancing himself from the so-called "boomer generation" and especially its engagement, along with other generations, older and younger, to seek racial justice and an end to war.

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.)