Furthering the Obama campaign's complaints about McCain running mate Gov. Sarah Palin's (R-Alaska) inexperience, Politico's Fred Barbash and David Mark turned to presidential historians for comment, who panned the wisdom of McCain's pick.

Yet as an e-mail tipster to NewsBusters pointed out, two of the historians critical of Palin's "lack of experience" donated money to Sen. Barack Obama's presidential campaign.  Our tipster was too generous.

When I went to check out at about 10 p.m., I found the following update appended to their August 30 article, "Scholars question Palin credentials.":

UPDATE: After reading this article, the McCain campaign issued the following statement: "The authors quote four scholars attacking Gov. Palin's fitness for the office of vice president. Among them, David Kennedy is a maxed-out Obama donor, Joel Goldstein is also an Obama donor, and Doris Kearns Goodwin has donated exclusively to Democrats this cycle. Finally, Matthew Dallek is a former speech writer for Dick Gephardt. This is not a story about scholars questioning Gov. Palin's credentials so much as partisan Democrats who would find a reason to disqualify or discount any nominee put forward by Sen. McCain." 

That update came at the very end of the article. As of publication of this blog post, no teaser has been placed before the article's first paragraph to clue readers into the information that may well point to a conflict of interest among the consulted scholars.

A simple search of the Federal Election Commission Web site would yield the information the McCain campaign sent Politico's editors, and most certainly could have been found in minutes if not seconds doing a simple online query by the reporters themselves.

—Ken Shepherd is Managing Editor of NewsBusters