It's been a week since the right-wing news site Insight published a completely spurious report that Hillary Clinton's election team was spreading rumors that Barack Obama attended a madrassa in Indonesia, and slightly less time since Fox News Channel and the New York Post picked up the story then backed off when it proved less than credible.

In today's New York Times, Fox News senior vice president John Moody did his best to explain what the "fair and balanced" network was thinking: "The hosts violated one of our general rules, which is know what you are talking about." (Moody apparently didn't break into raucous laughter at his own funny, or add an obligatory, "Get it? Get it?!")

But it's not the first time Fox (and MSNBC, for that matter) picked up such dubious Insight reports, including one about the president being unable to fire Karl Rove because "he knows too much" and another about vice president Dick Cheney planning to step down after the 2006 midterm elections.

For its part, the Washington Times is distancing itself from Insight, which is especially odd since the online magazine and the newspaper share an owner: Reverend Sun Myung Moon and his Unification Church, aka The Moonies. According to the New York Times, the Washington Times's "national editor sent an e-mail message to staff members under the heading 'Insight Strikes Again' telling them to 'make sure that no mention of any Insight story' appeared in the paper, and another e-mail message to its congressional correspondent instructing him to clarify to Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama that the Washington Times had nothing to do with the article on the Web site."

Washington Times editor in chief Wesley Pruden went so far as to say, "Some of the editors here get annoyed when Insight is identified as a publication of the Washington Times." Quick: someone tell the Times's and Insight's site managers that the Times has a persistent link to Insight in their navigation menu under Affiliates, and Insight prominently displays a link to a section featuring Pruden on Politics.

That's sure to make for awkwardness at the next Times/Insight intramural softball game. But lest Insight writers—many of whom are "reporters for major news organizations" moonlighting without bylines according to editor Jeffrey T. Kuhner—feel too bad, they can always remind themselves that they get paid as much as $800 per article. That's some pretty decent scratch for fiction.

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