David D. Kirkpatrick has a
look at
Insight, the on-line-only magazine that ran the story that the Clinton campaign was the source of the recent smear against Sen. Barack Obama -- that he attended an Islamic religious school when he was a child living in Indonesia. That story has been quickly debunked, but the magazine, which used to be connected to the
Washington Times, and its combative editor, Jeffrey T. Kuhner, refuses to accept the fact that just proving a story is false doesn't make it false.
Mr. Kuhner, in an editor’s note on Insight, said the Web site could not afford to “send correspondents to places like Jakarta to check out every fact in a story.” The Web site pays up to $800 for an article.
Mr. Kuhner said he was not yet convinced by reports from officials of the elementary school that Mr. Obama attended in Indonesia about its secular history. “To simply take the word of a deputy headmaster about what was the religious curriculum of a school 35 years ago does not satisfy our standards for aggressive investigative reporting,” he wrote.
If that doesn't tell you about the magazine's high journalistic standards, how about this one?
After Insight posted the article on Jan. 17, Mr. Kuhner said, he was disappointed to see that the Drudge Report did not link to it on its Web site as it has done with other Insight articles. So, as usual, he e-mailed the article to producers at Fox News and MSNBC.
If it's not good enough for Drudge...
