Earlier this month, there was a story in the online magazine Salon.com that raised questions about the reporting of Fritz Wenzel, a former politics reporter for The Blade.

"Bush's re-election may have been made possible by a Blade reporter with close ties to the Republican Party who reportedly knew about (Tom) Noe's potential campaign violations in early 2004 but suppressed the story," charged the writer, Bill Frogameni, a Toledo freelancer.

Tom Noe is the Toledo coin-dealer and Republican fund-raiser now under a federal grand jury investigation for reported campaign-finance violations.

He also managed the state's rare-coin investment funds and is thought by authorities to have bilked the state out of millions.

The Salon story charges that "several knowledgeable sources," none of whom the writer names, said that Mr. Wenzel "was told of Noe's potential campaign violations as early as January, 2004."

Did The Blade sit on a major story?

Not as far as the editors - who have aggressively pursued this story since they first heard of it - are concerned.

Fritz Wenzel also denies those charges. According to a statement he issued, he didn't hear of the allegations until after last year's election. Mr. Wenzel left The Blade in May, 2005, to start his own political consulting firm. He recently accepted a job in communications with Zogby International, the polling firm.

This spring, the "Coingate" scandal broke wide open, thanks to aggressive investigative reporting on the part of The Blade, beginning with an April 3 story.

Ohio Attorney General Jim Petro has said that Mr. Noe, who managed the state's rare-coin funds, stole millions of dollars from them. Gov. Bob Taft, whose political career seems likely to end under a cloud, thanks to the Coingate revelations, has said the state owes a debt to The Blade for exposing the scandal.

But did The Blade drop the ball last year?

This ombudsman sees no evidence that we did.

The Salon piece quotes me as saying that at times I thought Mr. Wenzel's reporting was slanted slightly in favor of Republicans.

I told the writer, who interviewed me last summer while I was driving across Virginia, that there were occasions when I thought he hadn't been as tough on the GOP as on the Democrats in his national and statewide stories.

I never, however, saw anything that I could say was overtly unethical. Not, that is, until near the end of his career at The Blade, when Mr. Wenzel hinted on his personal blog that Democrats may have been stealing elections in Lucas County. Democrats complained to me; I asked Mr. Wenzel if he had any proof, and when he said no, I said I thought he should remove the information from his Web site, which he then immediately did.

Had someone known about any of the Noe scandals in early 2004, and wanted that information out there, I have to believe - after a lifetime as a journalist - that they would have done more to get it out there than drop a few hints to one unresponsive reporter.

All it would have taken was a call to The Blade's investigative team, or to one high-ranking editor.

But that call never came. Did Fritz Wenzel know more about the Noe scandals than he admits?

That answer is probably unknowable. But, it is hard to see how that could have affected the presidential election. Gathering all the information on the complex web of scandals has taken months and is still not complete.

Finding these facts out during one of the most hotly contested elections in American history would likely have been more difficult last year. This year, there have been plenty of Republicans who have been willing to talk about Mr. Noe.

Last year, there was a presidential election at stake, and everyone thought it would be decided in Ohio, which turned out to be true. The wagons would have been circled.

Even had Coingate reporting begun, it is not clear if it would have affected the election. In 1972, the Washington Post reported vigorously on the Watergate scandal for months before that election, which nevertheless ended in a Nixon landslide.

In journalism, every relationship between an editor and a reporter is based on trust. Editors have to assume the people they work with are honest and ethical - until proven otherwise.

I do think the editors could have been more vigilant about the depth of Mr. Wenzel's reporting, given his known ties to the GOP - he had a previous career as an aide to a Republican congressman.

I also think they should have been concerned about his blog (a sort of journal he operated on the Internet.)

I believe The Blade needs a more clearly defined policy about reporters and what they put in cyberspace. I think it should be clearly spelled out that anything that creates the impression that any reporter may be biased should not be allowed.

But it is nonsense to suggest that this newspaper somehow had an agenda to help re-elect George W. Bush, or suppress information damaging to Republicans. Editorially, The Blade vigorously endorsed John Kerry last year. The news operation, which is entirely separate from the editorial board, has gone after Coingate as forcefully as I have ever seen any paper report any story, including Watergate.

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Tammye Stevens, who reads The Blade online from Oklahoma, was one of a number of readers who were disturbed by our story Oct. 4 about a North Toledo man who was gunned down in his home after he opened the door to two unknown men.

The story, written by Christina Hall, told movingly of the grief felt by the man's widow, who is expecting their baby. But at the end of the story, we also gave details of his troubled past. The victim had served time in state prison for burglary and drug trafficking and had other minor offenses.

Ms. Stevens felt that information didn't need to be included. "It was so very disturbing that your staff writer would include 'dirt' on a person that is deceased," she wrote. "Yes, he may have a past, but it was not necessary to include this past when he writing about his death."

Jim Wilhelm, city editor of The Blade, disagrees. "Any time we write a profile of a homicide victim, we include the good and the bad. We do the same for everybody. We don't sugar coat it, nor did we go out of our way to highlight the bad," he said, noting that the criminal record wasn't mentioned until the last paragraph of the story.

Your ombudsman agrees that in this case, The Blade made the right decision. Had the victim gotten in trouble for cheating in school, or if he had some mild trouble with the law as a teenager long ago, those facts might not belong in this story. But in this case, it is not only relevant, but may be potentially of help in getting someone to come forward with information about the killers.

Every human life is significant. Telling the full truth about any life lost violently is, however, our duty to our readers, even if that is sometimes unpleasant.

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Anyone with a concern about fairness and accuracy in The Blade is invited to write me, c/o The Blade, 541 N. Superior St., Toledo, 43660, or at my Detroit office, 189 Manoogian Hall, Wayne State University, Detroit MI., 48202. You may also call me, at 1-888-746-8610 or email me at OMBLADE@aol.com.

I cannot promise to address every question in the newspaper, but I do promise that everyone who contacts me with a serious question will get a personal reply.

First Published October 16, 2005, 10:54 a.m.