Nancy Pelosi was on the South Fork last weekend, although hardly anyone noticed amid all the excitement about Mitt Romney’s fund-raisers hereabouts. Ms. Pelosi, the Democratic minority leader of the House of Representatives, was here to promote the re-election of Tim Bishop, who is running for a fifth term as the representative from New York’s First Congressional District.

    If you’ve seen Ms. Pelosi on television, you know she is a polished and agile speaker. On this occasion, she praised Mr. Bishop’s leadership and mentioned bills on which he had offered “pragmatic and sustained” help. She warned of a national Republican victory and said Democrats were being outspent. A Democratic Congress next year, she said, would make public financing of campaigns a priority, second only to a new jobs bill.

    “We need to amend the Constitution to get rid of Citizens United,” she said, referring to the Supreme Court decision that gave meteoric rise to super-PAC funding of national campaigns. “We need to elect reformers. I don’t even care if they are Republicans, as long as they want to protect democracy.”

    In shorter remarks, Mr. Bishop reported that Karl Rove’s PAC, American Crossroads, had put thousands of dollars into the 2012 campaign by starting to run ads against him only four days after his election to Congress was confirmed in 2010. (He won by 593 votes.)

    Representative Nita Lowey, the Westchester congresswoman, joined Mr. Bishop in saying a few words. They agreed that his campaign needed enough money to offset the funds going to his opponent, Randy Altschuler, although, they said Mr. Altschuler’s war chest could not be matched. For Mr. Bishop, the election is about “what kind of a country we are going to remain.” Observing that he was Catholic, he said the bishops had spoken out against the Republican Party’s stance on the federal budget, saying there is an “obligation to care for the weak among us.”

    Disparaging the Republican belief that people would pull themselves up and out of poverty once government assistance were withdrawn, he asked how an infirm 86-year-old in a nursing home could do so. “Sixty percent of Medicaid money goes to support people in nursing homes,” he said. “Reasonable people must reject” that G.O.P. vision, he said.

    Ms. Pelosi touched on other campaign issues, as well. She agreed that the Affordable Health Care Act had not been put before the people effectively. The Supreme Court had given Demo­crats “a second chance” to do so, she said, as she vowed to “tell the White House to take advantage of it.”

    If you happened to wander down Egypt Lane on Sunday when one of two quiet events that day for Mr. Bishop was taking place here, you might have noticed a state trooper in a parked car and heard his dog bark. Closer to the house where the event, an ice cream social, was taking place, a handful of security personnel were at the ready. I wasn’t surprised that Ms. Pelosi is protected. I couldn’t help but remember the awful vitriol directed at her when she was speaker of the House (and, by the way, second only to the vice president in the line of presidential succession).

    The sun was still up and many of the toppings for ice cream sundaes still in bowls when the official group moved on to Sag Harbor to make another pitch.

   It’s comforting to me how we scoot along each year marking the calendar by holidays. January is cold and dark, and after the enthusiasm of the New Year wears off, I feel a bit of a letdown. February gets more exciting with my birthday and Valentine’s Day — seeing hearts everywhere makes me smile.

    I’m a big fan of St. Patrick’s Day, even though my family has been in this country for five generations. As spring arrives, everything is a bit brighter and the dreariness of winter is forgotten as we celebrate Mother’s Day and Father’s Day. 

    Mother’s Day is always quite an event. Flowers are sent, shiny jewelry purchased, breakfast is served in bed, and maybe Mom is sent to a spa for the day.  Poor Dad isn’t given the same attention. Father’s Day is often pretty boring. Maybe there’s a barbecue in the backyard, but Dad does the cooking. Most dads I know are given a small simple gift to mark the day. Why does St. Patrick’s Day get a parade and fun hats, but dads get a boring store-bought greeting card for their special day? Why are most Father’s Day cards either blue or brown?

    I know that Father’s Day was a month ago, but it bugs me that dads get so overlooked. I’m not suggesting we get our fathers two ties instead of one to show our love. I’m suggesting that we put some effort into our appreciation. 

    Remember when you were a child and you made your mom or dad a macaroni necklace in art class? The necklace took some effort and multiple steps were involved. Noodles have to be painted and laid out to dry. There’s serious consideration about which yarn color Dad might like best. The macaroni noodles have to be strung with care, and somehow there always seemed to be glue involved, though I can’t figure out why. Macaroni necklaces are a serious commitment, as far as gifts go.

    That effort and consideration somehow disappears as we get older and less creative. We run to the nearest department store to buy dad a shirt or tie or some other lame gift. And we buy a brown or blue greeting card with a sailboat or fish or mountains on the front.

    My mother died at age 29, and so Dad juggled a career in banking along with raising two young children in the ’70s. I might have been the more challenging of the two children, and it probably wasn’t­ easy for Dad to talk about “girl things” with me. But we survived. We did more than that — we flourished. Dad raised us without the benefit of after-care programs or support services for single and/or working families.

    How did he manage the house, laundry, meals, sports, scouts, homework, bath time, and broken bones, all by himself? I’ve asked him many times, especially since I’ve become a mother myself. He says he doesn’t remember. Sometimes I hear myself complaining about how busy I am and I try to shut my mouth and count my blessings. Life isn’t perfect, but you’ve got to play the cards you’re dealt.

    Dad and I are such different people. We have lively political discussions, really dissimilar ways of parenting, and flat-out opposite personalities. Neither one of us will admit it, but people say we’re also the same in many ways. My children will comment, “Grandpa says the same thing!” when they ask me about how they might handle a situation in their lives.

    My dad is a heck of a guy who is sweet, generous, and kind. He’d never describe himself that way, of course. He really doesn’t give himself enough credit. So here I am, telling all of you. My dad is the best! I admire him, even when we don’t agree. He raised my brother and me to have a strong work ethic and to set and meet goals. He was strict, but he loved us and told us so, even when we weren’t so easy to love.

    This year on Father’s Day my dad and I canoed the Peconic River with my two young boys. Next year? We’ll be making macaroni necklaces, of course. I think Dad will like a blue string best.

I should apologize at the outset to the man my kids and I call Wrong-Way Guy, but we’re kind of obsessed.

Maybe you’ve seen him — a white-haired man dressed all in black, who rapidly walks along Main Street in East Hampton with his sneakers treading on the white line at the side of the road? Leaning forward with his arms held just so, he looks as if he is ready for a fight or about to swat an oncoming car right out of the way. Weekday mornings, as we drive to school, keeping an eye out for Wrong-Way Guy is a way to pass the time. 

For a while we had a more ordinary game involving work and municipal vehicles. Electric trucks, tree trucks, and school buses, for example, were 5 points. A cesspool truck earned whoever spotted it 20 points. The wildcard was Ken Sacks, the father of one of the kids’ schoolmates behind the wheel of his old car. He was worth 50 points, but we only saw him once. Interest in the game waned, and watching for local characters took its place.

When I was young we would keep an eye out for Snow, an older man who walked the streets around Bridgehampton. I remember listening to WLNG one night during a blizzard. A caller phoned the radio station to say that it “looked like Snow!” was on the street. Not understanding, the host went along: “Yes, it sure does look like snow.”

“No, I mean, Snow! The man!” she said.

I never knew Snow’s real name. I think he might have been a Bridgehampton migrant worker who came for the potato crop and stayed. Someone knows, I’m sure, and I am going to make the effort to find out about him one day.

Captain Shipwreck was Amagansett’s answer to Snow, and of him I know somewhat more. His name was Richard Halliday, and until about 1980 he could be seen walking on Montauk Highway between his house on Oak Lane and Vinnie’s Barbershop wearing a striped engineer’s cap and, most days, hip boots. “Cappy Dick!” my teenaged friends and I would yell as we passed by in our cars.

Halliday was known as Captain Shipwreck after a series of misadventures at sea, including a swordfish trip that ended on the rocks at Montauk and the day a trawler sank from under him off Block Island. 

One winter, he spent more than a week anchored on the east side of Gardiner’s Island after his dragger’s engine wouldn’t start. He stayed there until his food and coal for heating the cabin ran out. Then he pulled anchor and began to drift. His boat was eventually spotted, and he was taken to shore. He died in 1981, and Amagansett seemed a lot duller.

An architect friend who lives in Sag Harbor shares my admiration for local figures. More than once, he has told me of his hope that someday he could join their ranks and wander into the village in his bathrobe to buy the morning paper. I tell him it’s a fine thing to aspire to.

   When I solicited Sinead FitzGibbon’s advice as to a lower abdominal strain that’s annoyed me for a while and has kept me off the tennis courts, she, a long-distance athlete for all seasons, said, “Take up golf.”

    Taken aback, I said, with as much finality as a diffident sportswriter could muster, “Never.” Which reminded her of her 82-year-old father, who had said when she made the same suggestion to him, ‘I’ll play golf when I get old.’ ”

    Now that’s the spirit! It’s not that I dislike golf . . . well yes I do. It is intriguing, yes, and, yes, it is fiendishly difficult, and thus a beguiling challenge, but I think the benefits, in the form of those well-publicized euphoric moments when the ball takes flight and lands where you want it to, far outweigh the costs in terms of the suffering one must endure.

    Besides, in golf you’re supposed to suffer in silence, take the slings and arrows in gentlemanly stride rather than rail at Fate and sling your irons arrowlike into the woods. One must, contrariwise, behave honorably, be courteous, and play by the rules. To do so builds character. What was it Falstaff said about honor? “Who hath it died a Wednesday”? Of course he was treating of risking one’s life on the battlefield, rather than self-destructing on a golf course, but I think there’s a connection. Who hath character shot 30-over on a Wednesday.

    And don’t pretend such woeful imperfection, such egregious falling short of the mark over the course of a four-hour round — for which you’ve laid out good money — doesn’t gnaw at the vitals. Okay, perhaps you have derived some pleasure, you’ve hit some shots of the sort they say keep you coming back. In the end, though, it’s a will-o’-the-wisp, a game for masochists in loud clothing.

    Now tennis on the other hand. Ah, tennis. A game that offers the joy of kicking butt (read reveling in the suffering of others), the antipathy that attends the invariable arguments as to whether the ball was in or out, and (for nine months a year) the ecstasy derived from bouncing undeleted expletives off resonant walls. Sort of like CERN in that respect.

    Tennis is a game for vicious people wearing white. I yearn to get back to it. In the meantime I must content myself with cheating at backgammon.

   The full impact of where I was standing during the Great Bonac Fireworks show on Saturday night did not really hit me until I saw a photo taken by someone on the tugboat floating right behind us, looking toward the barge loaded with fireworks where, with hard hat and goggles on, earplugs stuffed into my ears, I tipped my head back at virtually a right angle to see the shells exploding right overhead.

    Through the keyhole-like openings in the walls of the plywood shelter protecting the electronics panels firing the show — and us — was the orange glow of flames through gray smoke as the lift charges catapulted the aerial shells out of their mortars. The vibrations set off by the boom of the biggest started deep in my body, rolling outward through me even as the next rumbles rose through my feet from the steel deck of the barge.

    I heard snatches of the musical choreography — a bit of Van Morrison, a few bars of Adele — as I watched a fellow pyrotechnician holding his metal wand over each numbered spot on the board, moving from one to another to make the electrical connections as he listened through headphones to the cues: “Fire one, fire two . . .”

    I’m sure I had a goofy grin on my face. I was silent — mostly, except for a hoot or two — but every bone in my body, every cell and nerve end, was thrumming. Not only because I was in the bay, on a barge, only feet from a maelstrom, but because in those moments, all 22 minutes of them that stretched forever but went like a snap, I was totally, fully, joyfully alive. And it wasn’t just a rush. It was beauty, and life, and art. And destruction, explosion, mind-blowing power. All at once and manifesting itself in pretty, glowing special effects above my head.

    There was no fear involved. Fireworks by Grucci, the top-notch company that put on the show as it has for 32 years, has honed its procedures, testing worst-case scenarios and devising safety protocols to safeguard against them, over years.

    As an apprentice pyrotechnician, having taken the Gruccis’ training class last spring, I was surrounded by a skilled and experienced crew, except for one other newbie like me. They worked for the better part of three days to put together and break down the much-anticipated display. As the tug pulled our loaded barge through the flotilla of boats moored in Three Mile Harbor for a great summer evening, people on many of them applauded — a hand the crew well deserved.

    I’m honored to have been able to practice my wiring with Matt, a veteran pyrotechnician who patiently allowed me to work alongside him all day and showed me the trick of flipping a sweatshirt hood up over my hard hat to keep the sparks from going down my back, and all the rest, including Tom, my classmate, who gave me a high five to celebrate the accomplishment of our first big show.

    They, along with Steve, the chief pyrotechnician on the show, to whom I owe my gratitude for the whole experience, had my trust.

    Yes, of course there is a risk. But life is a risk. And not that I want at all to tempt fate, but I’ve been floored by things far bigger than an eight-inch mortar, emotionally at least. 

    Being in all likelihood past the midpoint of my life, in the midst of all of the slogging and striving we do to survive, and even the sweetness of ordinary days, I want all the kaboom I can get, as many moments of thinking, “So this is it,” and feeling heart-stoppingly alive, as I can find.

    I’d spent the day lending a hand to the crew as they placed each shell in its tube, unraveling the wires, connecting one shell to another, and attaching them to the electrical panels that would in turn be connected to the master boards. It’s painstaking work, hot and back-aching, but, a couple of us agreed at one point, somewhat relaxing, meditative. And then of course, later there’s that gratifying display.

    Everyone’s been saying what a spectacular show it was, and, with the Grucci artistry, I’m sure that’s true. My experience of it was so different from any other show I’ve seen, I can’t compare. Sure, it was beautiful, but it was just being there that blew the cobwebs out of my brain.

    The guys that have done years of shows, I noticed, are no longer awed by the visuals. Instead, they’re looking to see if every shell fires, to make sure the show is going off without a hitch. And if there is one — like a radio crackling out, muting the cues, or shells that go off prematurely, or fail to rise — they want to know just what went wrong.

    Nonetheless, when the last firework trailed away and the harbor filled with congratulatory boat horns and whoops, there was shared exhilaration, hugs all around, and comments like “Great show.”

    And now, I’m totally ruined. The thrill of fireworks will be, well, not so much of a thrill unless I am a part of them. And what the heck can I do to equal that thrill? I asked the crew. Just keep doing it, they said. Like they do.

    That photograph? Snapped by Anthony, a longtime pyrotechnician who kept the day lively with a dance step here and there, it was virtually all smoke and fire, white lightning framed by the squared edges of the wood shelter and the barge where I stood, having the time of my life.

    Joanne Pilgrim is an associate editor at The Star and recently completed training as an assistant pyrotechnician for Fireworks by Grucci.

   From time to time, you get to meet extraordinary people, people whose lives have made others better. Such was the case last weekend when Leymah Gbowee, a Liberian women’s rights and peace activist, came to East Hampton to participate at Guild Hall in what is called the Hampton Institute, a two-day series of talks and panels on topics of national concern.

    Ms. Gbowee won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2011 along with Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, the president of Liberia, and Tawakkol Karman of Yemen, a rights activist and journalist. The prize was deserved.

    Ms. Gbowee led the women’s movement that helped bring down Charles Taylor, the brutal Liberian president. You may recall television images of women in white tops and head scarves marching toward the presidential palace in Monrovia and refusing to go away until Mr. Taylor agreed to hear what they had to say. By that time, Liberia had suffered 12 years of civil war and at least 200,000 deaths.

    The prize has brought Ms. Gbowee to international attention and spurred her work for the safety and education of women and girls and for reconciliation and peace. She has founded two organizations, the Women’s Peace and Security Network and the Gbowee Peace Foundation.

    What is stunning when you meet her is not only what she has done and is continuing to do but her ability to cut through the cant, to explain what she is fighting for in simple, often anecdotal, language. Although only 40 years old, she has witnessed war, known child soldiers, been a refugee, and come out as a wise woman.

    Others who took part last weekend were pretty impressive, too. Kati Marton, for example, is the author of some seven books, with a new one about to be published about her life with her late husband, Richard Holbrooke. Dina Powell heads a Goldman Sachs initiative to empower women entrepreneurs. Kirsten Gillibrand is a lively and articulate New York senator. Joe Nocera is a New York Times columnist. Paul Goldberger, who now writes for The New Yorker magazine, is an expert on the man-made environment.

    And there were more, all accomplished and successful in their fields. But the inspiring spark of courage in Ms. Gbowee is impossible to miss.

    The program at Guild Hall was the third sponsored by the Roosevelt Institute, a nonprofit organization devoted to “carrying forward the legacy and values” of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt. Its mission is to “reanimate progressive politics and build a sustainable society.” At Guild Hall, the institute follows a series of somewhat more home-grown panel discussions that were called Hot Topics.

    Ms. Gbowee, who has four children of her own and is mother to two others, recently added the African Women Leaders Network for Reproductive Health and Family Planning to the groups she works for. But she acknowledges that finding peace through reconciliation in Liberia may be even more daunting than reproductive rights.

    “We have a whole generation of young people whose only means of settling disputes is through violence. And then we have a whole generation who have no idea of why we fought, but because of where they find themselves . . . their ethnicity, the social group, their religious group, they have to take sides.”

    Leymah Gbowee’s story is told in a 2008 documentary called “Pray the Devil Back to Hell.” She has also been assisted in writing a memoir, “Mighty Be Our Powers: How Sisterhood, Prayer, and Sex Changed a Nation at War.” I hope some of you will feel compelled to learn more about her.

   Summer is over. For me, anyway. I’ve been at The Star for June and July as an intern from the University of Colorado at Boulder. I don’t have to tell you that The Star is a terrific publication — you’ve probably been reading it for years.

    The stories are well researched by dedicated journalists who are serious about their craft. The newspaper that comes out each week is the beautiful result of a few dozen people and their pursuit of excellence. It’s been an honor to be a small part of that unit this summer.

    This internship has certainly taught me quite a bit about the journalism industry. The Star is in a charming old building with dozens of awards lining its walls. The editors have taken my reasonably written stories and other work and they’ve smoothed out the rough edges. Some of my stories needed more buffing than smoothing. I couldn’t have found a better place to learn and grow as I continue to improve my skills as a journalist. If I only had more time here.

   But, it’s back to my real life. I’ve been working part time on a master’s degree in journalism while I’ve worked full time at the university as an academic adviser for undergrads. I love working with young people — helping them navigate their way through college and majors, careers, and their social lives — many of them away from home for the first time.

    This summer gave me something I haven’t had in a long time, the thing I’ve wanted most in the world. This summer gave me time. I’ve had time to visit friends and family and introduce my children to dozens of people who are important in my life. I’ve had time at the beach. We’ve spent oodles of time wandering around Montauk while both of my boys searched for the perfect necklace to bring home. I’ve had time to just watch my children enjoy themselves without schedules of any kind.

    They’ve participated in sand castle contests, baseball games on the beach, a trip to the Lighthouse. They’ve been to an outdoor movie in Amagansett, made dozens of trips to Ben and Jerry’s, played some mini-golf, enrolled in surf camp, and swam pretty much every single day. Their usually blonde hair has been bleached from chlorine, sun, and the sea. Their little bodies are brown despite the tremendous amounts of sunscreen we’ve applied.

    Coming all the way to Montauk from Colorado for the summer has been quite an adventure. Throw two young boys into the mix and it makes things even more interesting. I asked my 9-year-old to describe his summer in one word.

    “Amazing,” he responded with shining eyes and a smile.

    Tomorrow we start our journey home. My oldest son starts fourth grade on Aug. 15 and the little guy starts kindergarten a week later. I’ll go back to work at the university. And life will go back to normal for a while. For a while.

    This summer, the internship, the entire experience really, have given me a lot to think about. I love the work ethic of the folks at The Star and of New Yorkers in general and I really love to write. Introducing my children to a summer at the beach and the wonders of searching for beautiful treasures from the sea has been fantastic.

    Once I get home, I’ll start trying to figure out if there is a way for me to write more, have summers off, and bring the boys back for summers on the East End once in a while. Lofty? Sure it is. That’s okay, though. I love a challenge.

 Kathy Noonan, an intern at The Star this summer, lives in Boulder, Colo.

    Invited out the other day onto the water, where I hardly ever go, preferring to take in the views rather than hang over the rail, I ran to CVS to buy some Sea Bands, thinking they might help.

    I shouldn’t have worried, for the cruise to and from Coecles Harbor on a restored wooden prewar cabin cruiser was marvelously placid, the adults convivial, and the children beguiling.

    I had bought a good bottle of California pinot noir for Ed Gifford, whose 51st birthday we were celebrating, though I’m afraid I drank most of it. At one point, I reported that my eldest daughter had, after spending a number of years in suburban Pittsburgh schools, proved to be an immediate hit when she moved back for the second half of her senior high school year.

    “Emily had been a cheerleader in Pittsburgh — they were raucous,” I said. “She livened things up here with new cheers.” 

    Whereupon everyone who’d been listening became constricted with uncontrollable laughter. Usually quick on the uptake, I waited until they came up for air and had wiped away their tears before asking what had been so riotously funny.

    “We thought you said, ‘Nude cheers’!” one of them said. “It wasn’t just me — she heard it that way too.”

     Then I began to laugh. “That’s the funniest thing I ever said,” I said.

    “But you didn’t say it,” said the captain.

    “Oh yes I did,” I said. “It just needed some fleshing out.”

    Later, I told Emily about it as we talked on the phone. “I had them rolling in the aisles, Emily.”

    “I’m not surprised, Dad. You’re a clown.”

    “ ‘How ill white hairs become a fool and a jester!’ ”

    “I didn’t say that.”

    “Prince Hal did. To Falstaff in Henry IV, Part 1. I’ve begun to read all of Shakespeare’s plays. They’re on my bucket list.”

    “Well, anyway, that was very funny. And did you also tell them I was the naked high-dive champion at the Maidstone Club?”

    Read a letter recently in The East Hampton Press the writer of which was outraged that a successful psychiatrist, who’d had “one glass of wine” at dinner, and who was driving his 86-year-old mother home, had been caught up in the police dragnet of a few weeks back.

    That fatal glass of wine had resulted in the “guilty-before-proven-innocent” psychiatrist spending the night in jail “along with 20-plus others.” The cops, she concluded, had acted out of spite, envious of the successful. Something “right out of Nazi Germany [had] occurred.”

    Now I know what to say should I be pulled over: Not “Do you know Eddie Ecker?” but “Do you know I’m a member of the 99 percent? See, it says so on the rear bumper.”

    Class warfare (“But the abundance of the rich will not suffer him to sleep” — Ecclesiastes 5:12) and Nazi Germany aside, I don’t like these mass stops either, though a lawyer friend said they were for the greater good and that therefore were not a fit subject for hyperventilation. “You really shouldn’t drive after having had two glasses of wine,” she said. And before I could say, “red or white?” added, “Contrary to what that letter writer says, you wouldn’t be arrested if you’d only had one.”

    I was sobered by her admonition, especially on hearing her say an accident victim stopped at a traffic light had been arrested for D.W.I. after his car had been struck by another drunken driver who had died in the collision.

    It is not the time, I suppose, given the five deaths and serious accidents here this summer, to recite Article V of the Constitution’s amendments, the one having to do with with warrantless (and thus illegal) searches and seizures.

    Still, I have some cavils: As for class warfare, Latinos seem usually to bear the brunt of it here rather than prominent psychiatrists, and as for the greater good, one wonders, having read Tom McMorrow’s front-page story last week about the Brazilian couple pulled over on Montauk’s lonely Industrial Road, if it is always served by our police. And finally, one wonders, having just been administered the sobriety field test by McMorrow himself, how many teetotaling “seniors” whose sense of balance has waned would pass!

    And now on to something more cheery. I was at the dump, as is my wont most summer days, when hailed by Joe O’Connell, a fellow avid tennis player who had enjoyed my golf guffawing column of the week before. The setting seemed particularly apt inasmuch as I and he — especially he, who has two new knees to which he recently added a new right shoulder — are living, walking examples of the efficacy of personal recycling.

    “Look!” he said, extending his right arm straight to the sky. Because shoulders are tricky and require a lot of rehabbing — and sometimes are never quite right — he said he had been forced to serve underhand for a while, “but the guys I play with had trouble getting those underhand serves back.” I told him I’d found the same thing last week when forced by a strained lower abdominal muscle that’s taken about a month in coming around to serve softly (though overhand) to my opponents as well. “Despite that, I won as many games as I usually do,” I said. “And now I know now I’ll be able to play this way into my 90s!”

    He spoke for both of us when he said in parting, “I’ll never give up!”

   A fuss broke out in the world of journalism earlier this month, when several leading news organizations admitted they had agreed to allow the Obama and Romney campaign staffs to review quotations before publication. A New York Times reporter, Jeremy W. Peters, broke the story about this devil’s bargain, which included his own paper among others.

    From where I sit in my creaky, wooden editor’s chair, it should be inconceivable that professional reporters at the highest level would go along with a demand that allows sources to massage what they (or their candidates) say after the fact or to kill unfavorable points altogether.

    According to Mr. Peters’s account, The Washington Post, Vanity Fair, Bloomberg, and Reuters had also agreed to allow interview quotes to be vetted by officials in exchange for access to sources.

    Accuracy is one thing, but that is not at all what the campaigns are interested in. Both sides frequently have asked for changes to off-the-cuff statements to make their man look better. The message, Mr. Peters amusingly wrote, can be, “. . . no, Barack Obama does not approve this message.”

    The single exception was the Associated Press, which deserves a Pulitzer for this just on principle. The AP’s rule, explained by its Washington bureau chief to Steve Myers, a Poynter Institute writer, was that changing quotes after the fact was a “red line” not to be crossed. That is how it is at this newspaper — as it should be across the journalism spectrum.

    I find it particularly bad that The New York Times, which suffered a serious blow thanks to Judith Miller (a part-time Sag Harbor resident) in the overheated lead up to the Iraq war, would agree to this practice.  Ms. Miller eventually was derided for working too closely with her sources in repeating false information to build the Bush administration’s case for the United States invasion based on erroneous reports about supposed weapons of mass destruction.

    It is perhaps a stretch to go from campaign trail blather to helping an administration send troops to their deaths on false pretenses, but the ethical standard should be the same. Reporters and news organizations that cede any part of the story to their sources’ control are no longer fulfilling their essential role as the people’s watchdog.