DENNIS MYERS Against the Grain Advertisement

In 1988, the Miami Herald staked out presidential candidate Gary Hart's D.C. home and, after a sporadic surveillance, published claims that a young woman had spent the night with him. Soon Hart was out of the presidential race.

To the dismay of many working reporters, the Herald enjoyed the support of editors and media entities around the country. Editorials and editors at notable newspapers like the Washington Post endorsed what the Herald had done.

That didn't happen for the New York Times last week. From coast to coast journalists and newspapers denounced the Times' shoddy report on John McCain.

The Times reported that nine years ago, telecomm lobbyist Vicki Iseman started hanging around McCain, who chaired a committee with authority over telecomm legislation. She attended his fundraisers, visited his offices and flew with him on a corporate jet. McCain's aides (so the Times said), worried that "the relationship had become romantic." and warned Iseman off. The article contained other details, some of which have been confirmed; others are under serious challenge. Worse, the principal sources for the story are unnamed, disenchanted (disgruntled?) former McCain aides.

The Times reported that letters to the editor it received are lopsidedly hostile, but it misrepresented this ratio in those it posted, putting up half for each side.

The Seattle Post Intelligencer subscribes to the Times' news service but declined to publish the McCain report and ran an editor's not explaining why: "It makes the innuendo of impropriety, even corruption, without backing it up. I was taught that before you run something in the newspaper that could ruin somebody's reputation, you'd better have your facts very straight indeed."

The Boston Globe, which is OWNED by the New York Times, refused to publish the McCain story. Its competitor the Boston Herald called the story a "smear job."

The San Francisco Chronicle's editorial was headlined, "Follow the innuendo." Project for Excellence in Journalism director Tom Rosenstiel said, "This is a story that rests on the suspicions, unproven, of unnamed sources." There were a few journalism defenders of the Times, but they were clearly in the minority.

The Times' ombudsman, a sort of in-house ethics cop, criticized the McCain story.

In an online chat, Times editor Bill Keller used more than 600 words to make his case for the article (the Times permits readers only 150 words in letters to the editor) and he sounded a bit chastened by the negative reaction: "I was surprised by how lopsided the opinion was against our decision, with readers who described themselves as independents and Democrats joining Republicans in defending Mr. McCain from what they saw as a cheap shot." Not, unfortunately, so chastened as to admit error, however. Keller kept chanting his alibi, that it was really a story about McCain's alleged coziness with lobbyists.

Even this fig leaf, however, didn't hold up. The Times had not nailed down the lobbyist angle any better than the "romance" angle. A reader complained, "As far as I can tell, he may or may not have done favors for a lobbyist; he may or may not have had an inappropriate relationship with a lobbyist." When a story takes a decade to research and write, more is expected of it. More to the point, the day after the Times story ran, the Washington Post managed to publish a similar story on McCain and lobbyists without dragging insinuation about women into it. (The Boston Globe ran the Post story instead of the story by its corporate parent.)

The Times story has succeeded in winning support for McCain in some conservative circles, though some social conservatives like Bay Buchanan and Rush Limbaugh seem more wistfully upset that the Times didn't run the story when it would have done the right wing some good. A New York television station asked editorially, "Did the Times hold the story because it had endorsed McCain on its editorial pages and running it before the primaries might have hurt his chances to win the nomination?"

In October the National Enquirer ran a story based on an unnamed source claimed that John Edwards had an affair with a campaign worker. What the Times did was the same thing.

But the most heartening thing that came out of this sorry matter is that so many journalists stepped forward to say, "The Times doesn't speak for me on journalism practices." Maybe our calling is learning from its mistakes.