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The New York Times is under fire after publishing a critical story about John McCain. (FNC)

The New York Times is in the crosshairs after publishing a lengthy and critical profile of John McCain Thursday that suggests — but does not outright say — that McCain had a romantic relationship with a female lobbyist and did favors for her clients from his position as chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee.

The New Republic published a long article Thursday afternoon on its Web site detailing the story behind the story and claiming, “What’s most remarkable about the article is that it appeared in the paper at all.”

The New Republic lambasted The New York Times for giving the green light, claiming the piece was “filled with awkward journalistic moves” and that it stepped around the suggested trysts with lobbyist Vicki Iseman by focusing on the debate in the McCain campaign itself about the relationship.

The presumptive GOP presidential nominee vehemently refuted the article with his wife, Cindy, by his side.

“I’m very disappointed in The New York Times piece. It’s not true,” McCain said at a press conference he called in Toledo, Ohio.

The Arizona senator, along with Hillary Clinton, was endorsed by the newspaper before their parties’ respective presidential primaries in New York on Feb. 5.

With only anecdotal descriptions and no evidence of an improper relationship, focus has shifted from suggestions of McCain’s supposed improprieties to questions over whether the Times should have ran the story.

“I don’t think that there is enough acknowledged sourcing for this story,” U.S. News & World Report Publisher Mort Zuckerman told FOX News, saying it is not news that follows the newspaper’s motto of being fit to print. “I really don’t think it rises to that level.”

A blog on The National Review Online said simply, “The Times doesn’t have the goods — at least from what’s in the story — and shouldn’t have run it.”

“The New York Times is giving the National Enquirer a bad name,” said Brent Bozell of the conservative watchdog Media Research Center. “The New York Times story today is all that about a story that is 10 years old. I have never seen anything like it in my life.”

The Times article described how McCain’s campaign aides kept him and Iseman apart during the 2000 election for fear they were giving the impression they were having an affair. It noted how McCain wrote to government regulators on behalf of a client of the lobbyist while he was Commerce Committee chairman.

The article had been rumored for months after a report on it surfaced on the Drudge Report in December.

The New Republic story reported that the idea for the McCain piece was hatched in November, when four reporters were thrown on the assignment. Over the ensuing months, the magazine reported that the story “pitted the reporters investigating the story, who believed they had nailed it, against executive editor Bill Keller, who believed they hadn’t.”

The Drudge piece sent the McCain article “into hiding,” but in the end, on Feb. 19, top Times editors and the paper’s attorneys gave the final draft a read-through and decided to publish, The New Republic reported.

“The Times ended up publishing a piece in which the institutional tensions about just what the story should be are palpable,” reads The New Republic article.

Keller released a statement Thursday saying, “On the substance, we think the story speaks for itself.

“On the timing, our policy is, we publish stories when they are ready. ‘Ready’ means the facts have been nailed down to our satisfaction, the subjects have all been given a full and fair chance to respond, and the reporting has been written up with all the proper context and caveats. This story was no exception. It was a long time in the works. It reached my desk late Tuesday afternoon. After a final edit and a routine check by our lawyers, we published it,” he said.

McCain’s aides have defended the Arizona senator in droves from the story. They argue that the newspaper published a deliberate smear under pressure from The New Republic, which two weeks ago called the campaign for comment on the Times story published Thursday.

“The New York Times — the newspaper that gave MoveOn.org a sweetheart deal to run advertisements attacking General Petraeus — has shown once again that it cannot exercise good journalistic judgment when it comes to dealing with a conservative Republican,” campaign manager Rick Davis said in an e-mail to supporters, urging them to contribute to the campaign “to counteract the liberal establishment and fight back against the New York Times. “

“All I can conclude is that this is the largest liberal newspaper in America trying to unfairly attack the integrity of the new conservative Republican nominee for president,” said McCain adviser Charlie Black. “There is no other good explanation for it.”

McCain senior adviser Steve Schmidt called the report “a smear … it reads like a tabloid gossip sheet.”

“I think this is going to play badly for The New York Times and John McCain is going to be fine,” Schmidt said.

The Republican National Committee even used the story as a fundraising pitch of its own Thursday in an e-mail to donors.

McCain himself lamented that “this whole story is based on anonymous sources,” saying that could encompass any of the more than 100 aides he’s had contact with through the Commerce Committee.

The newspaper quoted anonymous aides as saying they had urged McCain and Iseman to stay away from each other prior to his failed presidential campaign in 2000.

A senior McCain adviser said after the magazine article was released that McCain isn’t planning on talking about the Times story any time soon.

“We answered every question they had this morning. That’s enough,” the adviser said.

Click here to read the article on the McCain article in The New Republic.

FOX News’ Mosheh Oinounou contributed to this report.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 21st, 2008 at 2:14 pm and is filed under John McCain. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.