Bill Keller, executive editor of the Times, sees the timetable for the Ayers uproar in a very different way, telling Politico that the paper was motivated to report out the Ayers link because the McCain campaign has been pushing it — not the other way around. NYT: McCain camp pushed Ayers report

As the McCain campaign has launched a full-scale assault on Barack Obama’s relationship to ‘60s radical William Ayers, vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin has explained the timing this way: The New York Times made us do it.

The Times published a front-page story about Ayers and Obama on Saturday, and Palin said Tuesday she was simply “responding to the news of the day” by repeatedly mentioning Ayers on the stump.


Bill Keller, executive editor of the Times, sees the timetable for the Ayers uproar in a very different way, however. He told Politico that the paper was motivated to report out the Ayers link because the McCain campaign has been pushing it — not the other way around.

“We've reported the Ayers relationship before, and we had it on our to-do list for a while to take a more comprehensive look,” Keller said in an e-mail. “When the McCain campaign began to make it a major focal point of ads and stump speeches, we decided the time was right.”

“It didn't take any prodding,” Keller continued. “When the conversation on something controversial reaches a certain level, curious readers look to the Times to help them sort the facts from the fictions and figure out what to make of it. That's what we did.”

While Palin and John McCain — as well as talk radio and the conservative blogosphere — continue to cite the Times report as damaging, its tone was quite the opposite. The Times’ 2,100-word piece concluded that while Obama “has played down his contacts” with Ayers — a former leader of the Weather Underground who’s now an education professor at the University of Illinois — “the two men do not appear to have been close.”

Keller’s correct that the Times previously reported on Ayers and Obama. In April, the paper followed up on the Democratic debate in Philadelphia, where the issues surrounding the Obama-Ayers link came up.

But there had been no comprehensive report on the matter during this campaign cycle, including a serious look into Obama’s six-year role on the board of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, an education foundation. Ayers had been co-chairman of the Chicago School Reform Collaborative, a policy-setting body within the foundation.

Although records indicate that Ayers only attended six CAC board meetings in six years, Obama critics remain focused on what, if any, significant contact they had. Despite blog reports that Ayers had a role in appointing Obama to the board, the Times did not find that to be true.

Although the McCain campaign’s pushed the story, the Times was motivated, at least partly, by one of Obama’s harshest critics.

On Sept. 23, Stanley Kurtz — who’s been covering Obama’s activities in Chicago for National Review — published an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal in which he mentioned digging through the CAC archives, currently stored at the University of Illinois.

The Times had never sent a reporter to Chicago to investigate the archives. And there was a feeling internally that the paper should have looked into the matter earlier in the campaign, according to a source with knowledge of the Times' reporting process. Shortly after the Kurtz piece ran, Times reporter Scott Shane was assigned to do a more comprehensive take on where the two men crossed paths. Shane also spoke with blogger Steve Diamond, who claims the Obama-Ayers relationship runs deeper than has been previously reported. However, the Times' reporting proved differently.

The Times story managed to earn brickbats from both sides of the political aisle — often a standard for fair, objective journalism. Critics on the right blasted the paper for not bolstering their claims of a tighter relationship — including Kurtz who dubbed it a “whitewash.” But on Daily Kos and Huffington Post, among other left-leaning sites, some questioned about why the Times would promote the story on Page 1, above the fold, if there wasn’t any shocking revelation.

Keller said that was an “easy decision,” decided upon with managing editor Jill Abramson.

“We've run a lot of our pieces on the candidates' backgrounds — including many installments of the Long Run series — in just that spot,” Keller said. “The standard is not whether such a piece unearths some shocking new revelation. The value is in offering curious readers a fair, authoritative account of an episode that has generated a great deal of partisan heat and misinformation.”