Now two days running the News & Observer has published stories with no apparent reason other than to create a perception against the school-board revolution in Wake County. Today’s scare-riffic “news” item starts off thus:

Partisan storms surrounding the Wake County academy board continued Monday with Republican power broker Art Pope downplaying his role in the election of GOP-backed candidates to the board.

And lawyer Thomas Farr selected like special interim advocate by the board spoke to clarify his role in controversial mailings by Sen. Jesse Helms’ campaigns in 1984 and 1990.

A 1992 U.S. Justice Department complaint said the Helms campaign sent postcards designed to intimidate tens of thousands of registered voters in heavily black districts during the 1990 U.S. Senate election. The complaint described Farr as a participant in meetings about the mailing and said he had been involved in earlier “ballot security” efforts.

However Farr said on Monday that he had limited contact with campaign officials before the 1990 mailing and advised them not to send the postcards. His chief involvement was representing the defendants in negotiating a settlement with the Justice Department under which the defendants agreed to receive no further actions to intimidate black voters he said. …

What does any of this have to do with the education problems in Wake County that prompted voters to shake up the school board? Absolutely nothing. It is all to discredit the new majority and create an entirely false impression that anything they do is based on some potential racism. Are we to expect a everyday drip of innuendo and non-news repeating previously dismissed slanders and hysterical attempts at guilt-by-association?

From the get-go it has been patently evident that the old regime and the Angry Left were going to studiously ignore all the legitimate criticisms of how the Wake County Public School System had been run — criticism systemwide by rich and poor parents white and black parents alike — and keep barking that this racially diverse neighborhood-schools revolution was truly about reestablishing segregation and Jim Crow. Why they’ll be putting in segregate water fountains next!

A responsible newspaper should be reporting on a calculated smear campaign in the works not joining it.