Fred Turner, the first city editor I ever worked for, way back in 1973, when I was a cub, said, "Remember kid -- if your mother says she loves ya, check it out."

Did anybody ever tell John Moody, the executive vice-president of Fox News? Maybe so, or maybe he forgot the lesson. Last Thursday, when the I-was-attacked-by-a-big-black-man story came from a 20-year-old McCain volunteer in western Pennsylvania, Moody wrote on the Fox Forum that evening that the attack had the potential of being a "watershed event in the 11 days before the election."

"Part of the appeal of, and the unspoken tension behind, Senator Obama’s campaign is his transformational status as the first African-American to win a major party’s presidential nomination. That does not mean that he has erased the mutual distrust between black and white Americans, and this incident could become a watershed event in the 11 days before the election."

A little hyperbole there, ya think? It's one thing for ridiculous right-wing bloggers to have jumped all over this; they're eager for the final days of the campaign to turn rancorous, ugly and racial. Maybe the executive vice-president of a media organization that seeks to be considered credible should have waited another news cycle before making even a speculative judgement like that.

And, according to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the Republican candidates got in on this, too:

"The day after the purported attack, both Sen. John McCain and Gov. Sarah Palin called Ms. Todd, offering words of comfort," the newspaper reported Saturday. "Yesterday, McCain-Palin campaign spokesman Peter Feldman issued a statement: 'This is a sad situation. We hope she gets the help she needs.'"

Turns out the story was a hoax. Any armchair Kojak could have looked at the facts as reported to police in Pittsburgh last Wednesday night and advised a little caution in what was said about the incident, particularly given its racial overtones and its timing. It didn't take long before the alleged victim admitted she made the whole thing up. Now she's charged with filing a false report.

Moody probably regrets even addressing the incident on the Fox Forum web site. Then again, this is Fox we're talking about, a cable "news" operation that just hasn't set the bar very high for veracity and objectivity. I'm not sure that "caution" or "careful" are words heard at story conferences in any television news operation, local or national, and least of all at one with the right-wing bias of Fox. The McCain volunteer story had all the makings of a hot, juicy, racially-charged story. In terms of its sensationalist aspect, it was too "good" to be true -- -- exactly the reason to wait to see if it was true. 

Moody went a little further with his comment on this caper:

"If [the victim's] allegations are proven accurate, some voters may revisit their support for Senator  Obama, not because they are racists (with due respect to Rep. John Murtha), but because they suddenly feel they do not know enough about the Democratic nominee.

"If the incident turns out to be a hoax, Senator McCain’s quest for the presidency is over, forever linked to race-baiting."

All of this sounds a little over-the-proverbial-top to me -- both the part about the attack being a "watershed event" and about McCain's campaign being linked to race-baiting. It's always good advice to wait a decent interval before characterizing anything as a "watershed event." That's a newspaper sensibility and standard. But in the age of all-news-all-the-time TV and the blogosphere, there's the pressure to rush pronouncements or make fierce assertions. Fox and Moody played that game and got burned with a backwards B.