Several conservative bloggers have pointed out in recent days that the Los Angeles Times, which is accused of having a serious pro-Obama bias, has a video tape in its possession in which Barack Obama can be seen attending a conference with known radicals such as William Ayers and, especially, Rashid Khalidi.

Khalidi is aggressively anti-Israel and pro-Palestine, and he and his closes allies have repeatedly spoken out in support of Palestinian terrorist organizations such as the PLO and even Hamas.

According to an account published at the LAT months ago, the conference was outspokenly anti-Israel, poems praising terrorism against the Jewish nation-state may have been recited, and Obama was there. As such, the tape is of tremendous journalistic value, for it could very well be that it may show Obama to be good friends with and tolerant of outspoken haters of Israel, a key U.S. ally.

Additionally, of course, Jewish Americans are important voters.

Several conservative bloggers have called on the LAT to release the tape but they have thus far refused to do so. Today, the McCain campaign finally spoke out on the matter as well, saying that the LAT should release the tape. If it was a Republican candidate, the campaign argued, the LAT would have had no problem releasing the tape.

Politico, of all places, also contacted the LAT, asking them to release it. The LAT replied, however, that they would not do so, wondering whether they, the Politico, release such important tapes normally. To which Ben Smith replies: “The answer to that question is yes — Politico and most news outlets constantly make available videos and documents, after describing them in part, which is why the Times’ decision not to release the video is puzzling. My instinct, and many reporters’, is to share as much source material as possible.”

It will be interesting to see whether the LAT will release the tape or not. In the meantime, they are accused of liberal bias. Perhaps wrongly so, for there could be other reasons for the LAT not to release the tape as Smith points out in his report, but considering the reporting of the LAT in the last couple of months and especially weeks, the bias accusation seems, at the very least, plausible.