Objective journalism

While knocking around the discussion board at the Center For Inquiry (a site for humanists and skeptics where folks like me who disagree on lots of stuff are mostly welcome), I ran across a thread bemoaning changes to educational standards wrought by a Texas board.

There was talk that wascally Texas conservatives had edited Thomas Jefferson out of the history books.  That report seemed like an exaggeration, so I had to investigate.  Sure enough, it was an exaggeration.  The board has no direct power to edit textbooks.  The change in question occurred to a world history standard where Thomas Jefferson was removed from a list of political writers who contributed to the revolutions of the 18th and 19th centuries.

The New York Times had an informative, if biased, account of the proceedings.  I found part of it remarkable:

Even the course on world history did not escape the board’s scalpel.

Cynthia Dunbar, a lawyer from Richmond who is a strict constitutionalist and thinks the nation was founded on Christian beliefs, managed to cut Thomas Jefferson from a list of figures whose writings inspired revolutions in the late 18th century and 19th century, replacing him with St. Thomas Aquinas, John Calvin and William Blackstone. (Jefferson is not well liked among conservatives on the board because he coined the term “separation between church and state.”)

That bit about Jefferson was apparently extrapolated by some into a general ban on the mention of Jefferson.  But the part that particularly caught my eye was the part in parentheses.  Conservatives on the board supposedly do not care so much for Jefferson because he coined the term "separation between church and state."

I know a thing or two about the workings of journalism.  Journalists, as a rule, tend to defer to experts for the communication of key truths in their news reporting.  A journalist will tend to either quote an acceptable expert source directly or offer a paraphrase of information acquired from that type of source.  The paraphrase is typically accompanied by mention of the source so that the reader is not left to simply trust the reporter for the veracity of the information.

That enmity between the board's conservatives and Thomas Jefferson has no apparent source apart from the reporter.  Curious, I e-mailed the author, James C. McKinley Jr., to inquire about his source:

Mr. McKinley,

I was intrigued by a parenthetical claim from your recent story on the Texas school textbook controversy:

(Jefferson is not well liked among conservatives on the board because he coined the term “separation between church and state.”)

What the basis for this claim?  Is it common knowledge?  The product of the set of interviews with conservatives on the board?  Or perhaps even the opinion of an expert source you interviewed?

I'm trying to figure out how to view the sentence as an objective statement of fact as discovered by the methods of a journalist.  Thanks in advance for any assistance you can render.

No response from McKinley thus far.  He must be busy.  Or maybe I seemed excessively rude.  Maybe I'll send a message to the NYT public editor, Clark Hoyt.