New York Times piece on McCain missing vital ingredients

A friend and Herald Courier colleague, who is not a journalist, asked me Thursday what I thought about The New York Times piece on John McCain and his possible romance with a lobbyist during his 2000 presidential campaign. Here’s my answer.

The story was like a Christmas goose that had been pulled from the oven two hours before the timer went off. It smelled delicious, but the juices were still running red.

In other words, the story wasn’t ready.

MY SECOND take is that the story wasn’t rushed into print; but, rather, some vital ingredients were missing from the recipe. Those ingredients included identified sources or some other form of documentation.

Therefore, the story should not have been published at all, at least not the way it was structured.

At right is a link to the Times story. Web site registration is required. On Saturday’s front page, we reprinted an interesting story by The New Republic, which dissected the internal battle within the Times about whether to publish this story.

Regarded as the world’s greatest newspaper, and you’ll get no argument from me or any other credible journalist, the Times assigned four heavyweight investigative reporters to this story for three months.

THE MAJOR failing in this 3,022-word piece was that the beginning and end were devoted to a potential affair between the Arizona senator and a telecommunications lobbyist named Vicki Iseman, who is barely half McCain’s age. The word "potential" is optimum.

"Convinced the relationship had become romantic," the story says in the second paragraph, "some of his top advisers intervened to protect the candidate from himself – instructing staff members to block the woman’s access, privately warning her away and repeatedly confronting him, several people involved in the campaign said on the condition of anonymity."

That’s it? That’s the best you’ve got?

THE SEX portion of the story hinged on two anonymous campaign aides who now are adversarial to the presumptive GOP presidential candidate.

The Times’ policy discourages use of anonymous sources unless the reason for their anonymity is explained to readers. That didn’t happen with this story, which appears to have been heavily lawyered and edited. The result was a mushy, half-baked story.

McCain’s denials of an affair also were mushy and half baked. But at the end of the day, the story came down to this: Two anonymous sources with potential axes to grind suspected an affair. That falls short of the minimum news threshold, in my estimation.

Concrete evidence of an affair between a presidential candidate and a lobbyist whose clients were doing business with McCain’s Commerce Committee more than surpasses that threshold.

The Times story does do a good job of recapping the sordid Keating Five scandal, which ensnared McCain but – unlike some of the other politicos involved – left his career in tact.

THE STORY also does a good job of outlining an appearance of hypocrisy – McCain surrounding himself with lobbyists while crusading against those very peddlers of special influence.

Had the story stuck with the lobbyist angle, it would have been instructive and met the test of fair comment.

As published, with the vague sexual overtones, the story feeds the perception by many Republicans that the Times is a tool of the Left and that its liberal bias on its editorial pages carries over to the news sections.

I don’t believe that, but I also have my doubts about whether this story would have been published if you substituted the name "Barack Obama" for "John McCain."

One of the more curious aspects of this story is the fact that The New York Times editorial board endorsed John McCain in the Republican primary race at the same time the news side was ratcheting up an investigation into a possible affair.

J. Todd Foster is managing editor of the Bristol Herald Courier and can be reached at (276) 645-2513 or .