They couldn't print it if it weren't true

Last Sunday, Sally Jacobs in the Boston Globe profiled Michelle Obama's experience at Princeton. The piece as a whole was o.k., but one sentence on the front page before the jump galls the hell out of me:

Just last week the Barack Obama campaign took on an apparently baseless rumor that she had once been taped talking of white Americans as "whitey."

Responsible reporters and their editors do not report rumor, dammit! If the rumor becomes the story in this world of Drudge, they do not use weasel words like 'apparently', and they are professionally obligated to tell the back story. Instead, Jacobs let that sentence alone describe this bullshit smear.

Jacobs and the Globe failed on all counts.