In a letter to Stars and Stripes, reader Frank Leitnaker, of Miesau, Germany, urges the ombudsman to "weigh in" on an opinion column he hated. The column appeared March 6 and was written by Edward Wasserman, a professor of journalism ethics at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Va. (The column came to Stripes from a press syndicate.)

Wasserman's argument was that the media should stop dwelling on the private sex lives of public officials. No, he wasn't referring to the explosive news this week that New York Governor Eliot Spitzer was caught arranging a tryst with a high-priced call girl. The colunn was written before that revelation.

Wasserman was referring to the short-lived flap over a New York Times article that said some of John McCain's aides feared he was having an affair with a lobbyist. It went on to state that McCain had written letters that some could interpret as supporting the aims of the lobbyist's clients. Both McCain and the lobbyist, Vicki Iseman, denied having had an affair, and the senator also denied he had tried to help the clients.

The column ended with: "Let journalism get back to its proper focus, public immorality, and give sex a rest." (That eye-catching phrase made its way to the headline, too.)

Enter reader Leitnaker, who accused Wasserman of "yellow journalism," and both the writer and Stripes  of publishing "journalistic garbage." He condemned "innuendoes" in the column without describing them, but I'll take a crack at what I think he meant.

Toward the end of his column, Wasserman exhorts journalists to avoid stories of personal sex exploits and instead concentrate on "inconsistencies between public word and public deed." As an example, he cites the case of "a war hero who's running for president as a maverick, who claims to resist the blandishments of lobbyists, but who accepts perks from rich guys and intervenes with regulators to appease his benefactors." Gee, who could he be talking about?

Leitnaker asked me to "weigh in," so I will: Wasserman's feeble allusion to McCain's record after hundreds of words on seemingly another subject comes off as a bad fit at best, and a low blow at worst. And the cartoon that accompanied the column -- condemned as "vile and reprehensible" by Leitnaker (see the attached link) -- is in my view off the mark, taking the unproven sex angle as fact.

But, in weighing in, I'll still stick up for the author and the cartoonist. It's a free country, everybody has free speech, and opinions are permitted and defended -- with or without facts.