The Wash­ing­ton Post has a nice story up about Danielle Allen’s efforts to trace the ori­gins of the Obama-is-a-Muslim smear.

I should start by saying that Allen is some­thing of a hero to many us who know her even slightly, and not just because she earned two doc­tor­ates by the time she was 29. I don’t know her at all well, but as Dean of the Human­i­ties Divi­sion at the U. of C. she was the uni­ver­sity offi­cer most directly respon­si­ble for Chicago Review.

Ben Smith at Politico takes a swipe at Allen–or at least the Post’s val­i­da­tion of her research–for coming too late to a story that’s already been cov­ered by him and others:

There’s some inter­est­ing stuff in the story about how a smear spreads, but I’m not sure where the two doc­tor­ates come in. Indeed, Allen could have made it to her key discovery—that the author of the smear was a mar­ginal Illi­nois char­ac­ter named Andy Martin—without even resort­ing to The Google. Chris Hayes (who, with Jonathan Martin and me, has been obsess­ing about this since last fall) tracked it back to Martin in his Nation piece last October.

This kind of turf-​guarding is fairly pre­dictable, espe­cially when it’s jour­nal­ists and aca­d­e­mics who are stand­ing on oppo­site sides of the picket fence. (Smith, joking about Hayes: “Give that man a Ph.D. Or two.”)

But Smith’s self-​confessed super­cil­ious­ness seems mis­placed.

…is, they’ve been telling us since March 4, how the race for the Demo­c­ra­tic nom­i­na­tion was going to end. And sure enough, the whim­per­ing has begun in earnest. How do we know? Ben Smith at Politico is going on vacation.

If that doesn’t con­vince you, con­sider how quickly Adam Nagourney’s arti­cle in yesterday’s New York Times has become the cor­ner­stone of the new con­ven­tional wisdom about the race.

I’ve been read­ing a lot of polit­i­cal cov­er­age this pri­mary season—too much for my or anyone’s health and sanity. And in the course of that read­ing I’ve devel­oped a number of pet peeves about polit­i­cal report­ing. Many of these, I real­ize, are common and long-​standing com­plaints: from the echo-​chamber aspect of it all to the too-​predictable cycle that car­ries “news” from a cam­paign con­fer­ence call on Day 0 to sites like TPM and Politico on Day 1 to arti­cles in the news­pa­pers and in Slate on Day 2.

But one major com­plaint that I haven’t seen aired before is that both the cam­paigns and the news media appear to share an assump­tion that seems to me mostly unwar­ranted.