On the Run

Last week's non-story that suggested Hillary Clinton's campaign team was digging up dirt on Barack Obama-- namely that he might well be a closet terrorist-- traveled far and wide thanks to the efforts of our mainstream press. An unsourced assertion in a right-wing magazine spread like wildfire, predictably. And as this piece from Howard Kurtz acknowledges, sort of obliquely, Democratic frontrunners are already on the run from a press that seems interested mostly in making them look bad.

Fox News picked up the Insight charge on two of its programs, playing up an angle involving Hillary Clinton. The magazine, citing only unnamed sources, said that researchers "connected" to the New York senator were allegedly spreading the information about her rival for the Democratic presidential nomination.

The New York Post, which, like Fox, is owned by Rupert Murdoch, also picked up the article, with the headline: " 'OSAMA' MUD FLIES AT OBAMA."

Thus, in the first media controversy of the 2008 campaign, two of the leading candidates find themselves forced to respond to allegations lacking a single named source.