Q: - Professor News, is it true that the Hillary Clinton campaign team accused rival presidential hopeful Barack Obama of covering up his attendance at an extremist Muslim school in Indonesia?

A: - There is no evidence that the school preached Islamic extremism or that Clinton s campaign put out that message. But the tale did make an impact after it was launched on the Internet and spread through elements of the mass media.

Normally sensible friends of Professor News have been asking him what he thought about Hillary s attack on Obama. They probably saw the double-smear on the Internet or heard it on the Fox News Channel or a radio talk show or were told about it by somone who did.

On Jan.17 the Insight Web site (insightmag.com) posted an article that said Clinton s campaign organization was putting out the story about Obama.

The source of this information was not named.

The Clinton campaign workers supposedly spreading the allegation were not named. Even the writer of the article was not named.

(We re familiar with confidential sources. But a confidential writer? That s a new one.) This is not journalism. This is junk. Insight cleverly managed to smear both Obama, Democratic senator from Illinois, and Clinton, Democratic senator from New York, with one slime ball.

The Obama campaign says he went to the school briefly when he was 6 and that it was a public school and not run by Muslim fanatics. (Obama, incidentally,

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is a member of the United Church of Christ.) The Clinton campaign says it had nothing to do with disseminating the allegation.

The Insight Web site once was the Internet edition of Insight magazine, a conservative publication affiliated with The Washington Times. The Web site and

The Washington Times are owned by the Unification Church, led by the Rev. Sun Myung Moon.

The print magazine was folded, but the Web site lives on with a reputation for posting reports that are not only unverified but prove to be just plain wrong. For example, it said that Vice President Dick Cheney would step down after the midterm elections.

No one should take Insight seriously. Even The Washington Times, its former sibling, doesn t.

According to The New York Times, The Washington Times sent an e­mail message to its congressional correspondent to tell Sens. Obama and Clinton that the newspaper had nothing to do with the article.

But the Fox News Channel had no hesitancy about repeating Insight s double-smear. The hosts of the morning show Fox and Friends and Fox commentator John Gibson picked up the yarn and had lots of fun with it, mocking both the Clinton and Obama campaigns.

Conservatives Rush Limbaugh, Melanie Morgan and Lee Rodgers gleefully cited the Insight article on their radio talk shows without providing any corroboration.

Professor News was reminded of the Swift-Boating of John Kerry in the 2004 presidential contest. Often the media don t care whether a juicy accusation is true or false, just so it s out there and therefore can be considered news.

Fortunately, several news organizations including CNN, ABC News, Newsweek and The Washington Post, in addition to The New York Times did some independent reporting of their own and found nothing to substantiate the double-smear. The headline over the Times story put it nicely: Feeding Frenzy for a Big Story, Even if It s False.

A tip of the hat to these news organizations for checking out the anonymously written Insight article. And a shame-on-you to Insight for its junk journalism and to the Fox News Channel and the radio talk show hosts for giving junk journalism credibility.

Paul Janensch, former top editor at three newspapers, teaches journalism at Quinnipiac University in Hamden. He is a resident of Rowayton. His commentaries can be heard on the five stations of WNPR Connecticut Public Radio.