The biggest story of the campaign is that a man running for president was not only a close associate, but was quite possibly even a protege of an unrepentant terrorist.

It's huge, rapidly unfolding news, but aside from yesterday's WSJ article, it's still not news to most voters, and I think it's obvious that the MSM want to keep it that way. They're more concerned with investigating the intricacies of an obscure Alaska bridge that wasn't built.

The Corner's Peter Kirsanow summarizes the latest:

Stanley Kurtz's piece today describing what appears to be an attempt to cover-up the extent of Sen. Obama's ties to William Ayers should have journalists salivating. This is a big story that, so far, the press seems determined to avoid.

A rookie reporter could look at what Stanley's adduced and clearly see that Sen. Obama has engaged in serious misdirection regarding his relationship with Ayers. The ties between the two are far more lengthy and extensive than Obama admits.

They have to. The mere possibility that Obama could be a protege of an unrepentant terrorist is immensely damaging, which is why it has to be covered up by Obama, and why the coverup itself has to be covered up by the MSM. If the voters learn about this, and have time to learn about who Ayers is, they will not want to elect Obama president. The longer it goes unreported, and questions are not asked, the better the chances that the voters will never know.

As to the swarms of reporters who have investigated every facet of Sarah Palin's life, they have done their damnedest to make her minuscule association with the Alaskan Independence Party a major campaign issue, but where it comes to an unrepentant terrorist having a close relationship with a presidential candidate, and who might even have been the guy's mentor, they don't consider it even worth a look.

...What did Ayers see in (or hear from) Obama that caused the former to take such an interest in him?

Stanley shows that there's a reasonable probability that Ayers plucked Obama from obscurity to chair the Chicago Annenberg Challenge ("CAC"). Then, after working together on the CAC and directing millions to radical organizations, Ayers hosted Obama's political coming out party. That certainly looks more like a mentor-protégé relationship than a tenuous relationship between two guys who happen to live in the same neighborhood.

The story of a why an unrepentant terrorist has such a close relationship with a presidential candidate should have reporters swarming over the Obama campaign demanding answers.

"The association between Obama and Ayers has received virtually no attention from the three broadcast networks, with the conspicuous exception of a primary-season debate sponsored by ABC when George Stephanopoulos asked Obama about his relationship with Ayers. Out of 1,365 broadcast evening news stories about Obama prior to the end of the primaries, only two mentioned Ayers - one a brief mention of the debate question on the April 17 'Nightly News,' and the other an April 20 'World News Sunday' story about [John] McCain raising the Ayers issue on 'This Week.'

"With just 42 days left until Election Day, the broadcast networks have not presented a single in-depth report on Obama's relationship with Ayers. But Kurtz's review of the documents at the Chicago Annenberg Challenge (CAC) showed the two 'worked as a team to advance the CAC agenda,' which 'flowed from Mr. Ayers' educational philosophy, which called for infusing students and their parents with a radical political commitment, and which downplayed achievement tests in favor of activism.'"

Read Stanley Kurtz's full report here. More background here.

That a story of this magnitude is being ignored, involving as it does a man poised to be elected president, is nothing less than shocking.

Whether it's surprising is beside the point. There's only one way to get them to stop ignoring it, and that's to make noise.

MORE: Clarice Feldman looks at the close working relationship between Obama and Ayers, and asks some good questions:

How is it possible that Obama in writing two autobiographies could ignore his 13 year-long association with Ayers if he were not purposely trying to hide or downplay it? How is it possible that the media could continue to ignore the CAC story? How is it possible that American voters, who regularly indicate such enormous concern over educational issues, could be so long kept in the dark by the Fourth Estate about the educational project Obama ran into the ground while he aided his revolutionary pals in recruiting Chicago kids to their extreme left wing mission?