Taken together, the two suggest a dereliction of duty on the part of a press corps that has devoted so much ink to the Ayers story over the last week. Campaign reporting is a zero-sum game; every reporter following the Ayers story is a reporter who isn’t following stories about the candidates’ economic policies and the like. If reporters are going to cover the Ayers story—and it does deserve some coverage—then they need to do so smartly, sharply, in a way that doesn’t allow a single side’s myopic talking points to hijack the campaign narrative. In a way, in other words, that has as its primary concern the needs of the voters.

One simple way to serve those needs better: clarify who Ayers is and what he did to deserve being called a “domestic terrorist” (or, abbreviated, “terrorist”). The Ayers-as-terrorist framework has made its way into coverage of the campaigns, in narratives and in quotes from Palin (and, now, McCain). For me, though, and probably for most Americans, the term “domestic terrorist” conjures images of Timothy McVeigh; “terrorist” on its own evokes, of course, Osama bin Laden. Neither of these figures is an accurate analog for Ayers. Absent any other context or explanation about Ayers’s brand of “terrorism,” though, September 11 and Oklahoma City are the connections left in voters’ minds. Not only is that misleading, but it’s unfair, as well. To all involved.

The lede of the Times piece, headlined “Obama and ’60s Bomber—A Look Into Crossed Paths,” describes the Weathermen as “launching a campaign of bombings that would target the Pentagon and the United States Capitol.” The tenth graf of the story mentions that “federal riot and bombing conspiracy charges against him were dropped in 1974 because of illegal wiretaps and other prosecutorial misconduct,” without clarifying that Ayers hadn’t been charged for murder. And it’s not until thirty-four grafs into the forty-graf-long article that the Times gets around to mentioning the fact that “most of the bombs the Weathermen were blamed for had been placed to do only property damage”—a fact that changes the picture of a McVeigh- and bin Laden-like Ayers significantly.

None of which is to exculpate Ayers, or Obama for his relationship to him. It is to say, though, that the best way for the press to serve the voters in discussing the Ayers story—as it is in discussing every story—is to provide them with information rather than speculation. And to balance the information they share with a healthy dose of skepticism as to the Ayers story’s ultimate relevance, tempering stenography with accountability. If the media don’t start striking such balances when it comes to the Ayers story, they run the risk of writing themselves into irrelevance. And of letting the proverbial kitchen table edge a little too close for comfort to the McCain campaign’s kitchen sink.

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