Newspaper Under Fire

The story quoted one on-the-record source, former McCain strategist John Weaver, who said he had arranged a 1999 meeting between a top campaign aide and Iseman at Union Station at which she was asked to stay away from the senator. Weaver left McCain's campaign last summer during a near-implosion over staffing and fundraising.

The key unnamed sources are described as two former McCain associates, interviewed independently, who "said they had become disillusioned with the senator." But that information does not appear until the article's 41st paragraph.

"We push very hard to get sources to go on the record," Keller said. "You can't always succeed." He said the Times has "cracked down" on its use of anonymous informants and tries "to tell you what we can about a source's motivation and access to information."

The story was the subject of considerable internal debate, going through more than a dozen drafts, say people familiar with the process who did not want to be named discussing private deliberations. They disputed an online report by the New Republic yesterday that Keller held up the piece by asking for more evidence of a romantic involvement.

Instead, they say, Dean Baquet, the paper's Washington bureau chief and a former investigative reporter, pushed for a harder-edged piece, while Keller ultimately decided on a broader narrative that traced McCain's career from his involvement in the Keating Five scandal of the late 1980s to his reinvention "as the scourge of special interests, a crusader for stricter ethics and campaign finance rules, a man of honor chastened by a brush with shame."

Marilyn Thompson, one of the four members of the Times' reporting team, resigned recently and will rejoin The Washington Post, where she was a longtime investigative editor and reporter. Thompson said yesterday that her departure was "not directly related to the story" but that she had received "a very good offer to return to editing at a point where I realized that was a job I would find more agreeable. . . . I've been in the business long enough not to leave a job over a single piece of journalism."

The Post, which had been pursuing its own story on McCain's dealings with Iseman, decided to publish its report in yesterday's editions after the Times piece appeared online. The Post story also cited several unnamed sources and also quoted Weaver.

Leonard Downie Jr., The Post's executive editor, said the paper has been pursuing numerous stories about McCain and lobbyists and was aware of the Times inquiry. "We probably wound up talking to similar sources," he said. As the Times neared publication, Downie added, "some sources were more forthcoming in recent days than they had been previously."

The Post made no mention of McCain's aides expressing concern about a possible romantic relationship with Iseman nine years ago. "What we published is what we had," Downie said. "Maybe they have information we didn't have."

The Times -- whose editorial page, coincidentally, endorsed McCain for the GOP nomination -- has been repeatedly denounced by prominent conservatives over national-security stories that relied on unnamed sources. In 2005, despite a personal appeal by President Bush to Keller and Publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr., the Times disclosed that the administration was eavesdropping on some Americans and foreigners without court orders. That Pulitzer Prize-winning report also drew complaints from some liberals, because Keller had held it as not ready for publication during Bush's reelection campaign.

In 2006, Bush called the Times' conduct "disgraceful" after the paper published details of a secret federal program to monitor the financial transactions of terror suspects. Several conservatives called for the Times to be prosecuted for violating espionage laws.

McCain has famously prided himself on being friendly and accessible to reporters, but that didn't stop campaign manager Rick Davis yesterday from releasing a fundraising letter calling the Times part of "the liberal attack machine." Radio host Laura Ingraham said the episode should teach the senator that the major newspapers are run by "partisans" and "piranhas."