The Washington Times Insight Magazine online edition reports the Illinois senator and Democratic presidential candidate attended a madrassa, a conservative Islamic school, when he was a kid and his family lived in Jakarta for a time.The source of this revelation, the Web site said, was "researchers connected to" the Clinton camp. Fox News discussed the Insight article on two of its programs. The story spread far and wide through Web sites and e-mail chains.

The juicy tidbit at the heart of the story, the hint that Obama's primary-school education set him up to embrace radical Islam should he become president, was wrong. He's a Christian. He didn't attend a madrassa in Jakarta.The Clinton folks say the story is "scurrilous" and the product of a "right-wing rag" and that they had nothing to do with it.

It took a few hundred years for journalism to reach the stage at which the best truth one could find was the force behind what was published, broadcast, put before the public. Critics find it hard to believe, but much of what is called "mainstream media" agonizes every day over what is true and what is not, because it is wrong to print what is not provably true.

In that context, what Insight did on its Web site, and what Fox News did in repeating the report, was not ideological at all. It was unethical, unprofessional and shabby, a trifecta, if you will, in the world of journalism.

It also is a sign of the growing indifference Internet "journalism" presents on the question of truth. Rumor is good enough. Bibles of blogging are created based on nothing more than rumor.