It is sometimes a thin line between parody and reality. Exhibit A: The reaction from a Massachusetts journalism professor to a recent report on campaign contributions by news people.

You may recall the report, in which MSNBC detailed the campaign contributions made by 144 journalists over the past few years. (I mentioned it last week, but I won’t make you dig through my archive. You can find the story here.) I thought it was a fine bit of reporting. The story explained the methodology, solicited comment from everyone named, and best of all its author didn’t try to amp up the findings. Information was provided carefully, and readers were free to draw their own conclusions of its significance.

But then came the professor, Chris Daly, who on his blog outlined several complaints about the MSNBC report. His very first objection was about the story’s headline, which was this: “Journalists give campaign cash.” Daly commented, “Note the ambiguously unmodified noun ‘journalists’ — Does that mean all journalists? Most? Many? Some? Who knows?”

Who knows? Well, that would be anybody who read the story. And this is coming from a guy whose blog site is “journalismprofessor.com.” Uh, Chris? Is there only one journalism professor in the world? Isn’t your domain name itself ambiguously unmodified? Just saying.

But the pecksniffian professor’s parade of giggles was only starting. He went on to propose a headline with more context. Daly, after calculating that the 144 journalists mentioned in the MSNBC report constitute 0.1 percent of the industry’s total of newspeople, said the headline could have been: “99.9 % of U.S. journalists do not donate to politicians.”

In that spirit, let’s apply Daly’s guidelines for headline-writing to some other news events. For instance, let’s look for this headline tomorrow: “99.9% of Iraqi civilians uninjured in mosque bombing.” Or maybe this one: “99.9% of college lacrosse players not wrongfully accused.” (It would be interesting to see, if those headlines actually made print, what Daly would have to say about them. I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t be good.)

But Daly’s best was yet to come. He then complained that the MSNBC story didn’t add up the amounts given by the 144 journalists into one grand total, nor did it tell us how that total compared to all political contributions in the same period. “I suspect it would be half a drop in a very big bucket,” he writes.

Let’s focus here, professor: The point of the story wasn’t how much or how little the journalists had given to politicians. It was that they’d even given at all.

The New York Times recently reported that John Edwards’ nonprofit organization, the Center for Promise and Opportunity, was apparently created as a device by which he could essentially run a presidential campaign while also sidestepping federal scrutiny because, hey, he’s fighting poverty. Politics? What politics?

It was a perfectly appropriate story for this campaign season, casting a skeptical eye on a fellow who has positioned himself as the candidate most pained by poverty. Edwards may be sincere in portraying himself as a friend to the poor, and I tend to believe he is sincere, but as the Times makes clear he’s not above using poverty to game the system of campaign regulation.

Edwards’ hometown paper (and my former employer), the News & Observer of Raleigh, ran the NYT piece a few days ago. A natural question arises: Why is the N&O letting somebody else do this reporting? This is its turf.

I don’t know the answer, but I can take a guess. The Times simply picked off a story in the N&O’s backyard, and the local paper had two reactions available to it: Either ignore the story or swallow hard and run somebody else’s reporting. The responsible thing to do, if you’re truly interested in the timely supplying of information to readers, is to run the NYT story. So that’s what the N&O did, and that was the right choice.

But the other thing this little inter-industry drama reveals is the difficulty any mid- or small-market news organization faces when a local person makes a serious run for president.

Simply put, it is difficult for a local paper like the N&O to cover a homeboy’s presidential candidacy with the kind of bulldog vigor it brings to other events. There’s much more uniquely at stake than is the case with other stories. If John Edwards gets elected president, an enormous boom will hit the Triangle, boosting both its economy and its image. Local people will get important jobs in Washington. Politics, already a big business in Raleigh, will become even more of an economic engine. There conceivably could be a presidential library located here someday. The collective ego of a community gets more invested in the prospect of a local fellow being president than it does by the prospect of, say, Toyota building a huge job-generating, economy-enriching assembly plant in the area.

So how much unflattering coverage of the local candidate can a newspaper produce before it seems to be intent on killing the golden egg-laying goose?

It’s a fine line. If there’s not enough tough reporting, the newspaper quickly becomes seen as a cheerleader. Too much tough reporting, and the paper comes across as unreasonably antagonistic. Getting that balance right is harder than most readers can imagine.

Sometimes, having another news organization pick off an important story unfavorable to the local candidate – which the hometown paper can then publish itself, but with ready-made deniability of ill intent – isn’t an embarrassment at all. It’s a gift.

Here’s an existential conundrum for you: How much liberal bias can the media have if the proof of that bias is rooted out by the media itself? While you’re puzzling over that Gordian knot of logic, go here for a report from MSNBC on political contributions made by journalists since 2004. The investigation identified 144 media people who gave money to political candidates, parties or PACs. Of that total, 125 of them donated to Democrats and liberal causes. I went over the list name by name, and discovered I’m a personal acquaintance with a grand total of one contributor: Los Angeles Times writer Dan Neil, who made himself famous in Raleigh by turning his car reviews for the News & Observer into a bizarre art form. The conclusion? The people I hang around with don’t have enough money to make such contributions. Or maybe they have both money and the good sense not to give it to politicians.

Haven’t had your fill of Mike Nifong yet? Well, I pity you, but I understand that some itches need a lot of scratching. So here are two more things to read about l’affair Nifong. The first is an explanation why his removal from office is a one-time, perfect-storm event, not an indication that prosecutorial misconduct is taken seriously by the justice system. (We in North Carolina don’t even have to look far to know that’s true. Prosecutors here put an innocent guy on death row by doing the same thing Nifong did — hiding exculpatory evidence — and their punishment a couple of years ago couldn’t even be called a slap on the wrist.) The other piece notes an interesting historic parallel between the Duke lacrosse case and the famous Jim Crow-era trials of the Scottsboro Boys. After you read it, you’ll surely have to acknowledge, as I did, that we’ve achieved a strange kind of social progress: White skin can get you convicted in the court of public opinion just as surely as black skin once did.

I can’t conclude on that ponderous note, however. Go here for some unadulterated fun. I suspect that no genre of music lends itself more readily to parody than rap. Throw in some Riverdance and random images of the bar from “Cheers,” and you’ve got yourself one strange, hilarious music video. Go ahead and dance. I do every time I watch it.