Everyday Ethics

Presidential Candidate John McCain has stirred up a small storm around a six-month-old story in the LA Times by staff writer Peter Wallsten. The story was hardly favorable to Obama. It examined his history of support for those who advocate on behalf of Palestinian rights and contrasts that with his current support for Israel. It explains how Obama has found common group with two groups of people who are often professed enemies.

In the story, Wallsten describes a tribute in 2003 to Professor Rashid Khalidi, a well-known scholar and former advocate for the Palestine Liberation Organization. Khalidi was leaving his post in Chicago for a job at Columbia University in New York.

As part of the reporting for the story, Wallsten obtained a video of the farewell party, which Obama attended. He used it to describe Obama's statements and demeanor while speaking there. The party was one of several private events that have left Arab-Americans fond of Obama, despite his public pro-Israel stance.

Wallsten is a political reporter at the LA Times who has spent the year doing unique analysis and asking tough questions off the beaten trail.

On Tuesday, Ben Smith of Politico quoted a McCain spokesman complaining that the LA Times was "intentionally surpressing" information that could reveal more about Obama's relationship with Khalidi.

The Dallas Observer did a nice job last week dissecting the alternatives employed by the four local television stations after the Dallas Police Department released the dashboard video of a patrol officer driving into a 10-year-old boy on a bike. The boy died.

The officer was responding to a call about 7:30 p.m. It was dark. He was traveling about 70 mph without lights and sirens down a four-lane road, where the speed limit is 40 mph. Each of the four TV stations employ different editing tools in displaying the video. Two show the impact.

Read more to see how the stations approached this.

Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin told Townhall blogger Hugh Hewitt that she's "surprised that so much has changed since I received my education in journalistic ethics."

She was responding to a prompt by Hewitt that suggested that Charlie Gibson and Katie Couric had both been unfair in their interviews with the Republican nominee for vice president.

Here's the full exchange: