TIME: Almanac 1990/1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso/time/071089/07108900.001

Text File | 1990-09-17 | 6KB | 107 lines

PRESS, Page 53

Is It Right to Publish Rumors?

In an age of dirty politics, alas, mudslinging is part of

the story

By Walter Shapiro


    Even though it has been 30 years since Allen Drury published
Advise and Consent, the landmark novel of backstairs intrigue on
Capitol Hill, its plot remains eerily contemporary. Against the
backdrop of a brutal confirmation battle reminiscent of the John
Tower nomination, the 1959 novel portrays an earnest young Senator
who tries in vain to resist political blackmail over a homosexual
encounter in his distant past. But the Senator is driven to suicide
when he learns that an unsavory syndicated columnist is about to
print the politically devastating charges. A fictional Washington
Post executive explains haplessly that while no responsible paper
will publish the scurrilous column, "some little paper somewhere
will run it big as life, and then the wire services will feel they
have to pick it up and send it across the country . . . And there
we'll be, trapped in our own operation."

    Public mores may have changed over the past three decades, but
the press still finds itself trapped by the rituals that govern its
coverage of scabrous gossip. Today the journalistic rules of
righteous rumormongering have been liberalized, even though the
results in the form of tarnished reputations often remain all too
familiar. Leading newspapers and the television networks are less
likely to permit the wire services to do their dirty work for them.
Instead, the new, more permissive approach allows them to write and
broadcast artfully crafted stories about the rumors themselves,
thereby spreading calumny while piously decrying it.

    During the spiritually enervating marathon that passed as the
1988 campaign, presidential candidates were forced to refute
publicly rumors of homosexuality, mental illness, illegal-drug use
and extramarital affairs. Yet the Donna Rice episode, following
months of pious denials of womanizing by Gary Hart, can only have
strengthened the public's cynical suspicion that smoke inevitably
signals an inferno of secret scandal. Hart's dramatic downfall was
an embarrassing spectacle, especially for all the journalists who
missed the story. Pam Maples, a political reporter for The Rocky
Mountain News in Denver, expressed a typical reaction: "This paper
has tended to be very conservative about rumors. After the Gary
Hart story broke, there was guilt here among some of the editors
and reporters. You know, he was the hometown boy. The feeling was,
Shouldn't we have been doing that story?"

    Presidential campaigns have never been an arena for the
fainthearted: the awesome powers of the office may implicitly
permit the press to waive normal strictures of taste and delicacy
in the pursuit of rumor. But until recently, journalists tended to
judge members of Congress by a more humane standard. It was not too
long ago that a prominent legislator could be carried off the
Senate floor in a drunken stupor without a word of his public
intoxication appearing in the press. Such journalistic
self-censorship certainly did little to promote sobriety among
public officials, but it did help create an almost unimaginable era
of political comity in Congress.

    How sad and sordid, in contrast, is the current rule of rumor
on Capitol Hill. Perhaps the nadir was reached with the recent
press coverage of the baseless and base charges that House Speaker
Thomas Foley is a homosexual. Syndicated columnists Roland Evans
and Robert Novak initially helped stir the muck by referring to
rumors about "the alleged homosexuality of one Democrat who might
move up the succession ladder." As the gossip oozed along the halls
of Congress, New York Daily News columnist Lars-Erik Nelson
published the details of the whispering campaign against Foley in
order to finger the staff of Congressman Newt Gingrich as one of
its sources. Never mind that the Foley rumors were completely
false. Once the Republican National Committee launched its own
smear campaign against the new Speaker, using sniggering language
like "out of the liberal closet," virtually every news organization
felt compelled to repeat the slur, regardless of the damage it
would cause.

    After participating in Foley's ordeal by innuendo, few
journalists could claim that theirs is a higher calling than
ordinary occupations. Thus how tempting it must be for armchair
analysts to decree that henceforth no responsible publication or
newscast should disseminate unsubstantiated rumors. But while
preserving the dignity of the unfairly maligned, would such a
high-minded standard also serve the public interest? Or are current
journalistic practices -- as unfortunate, unfeeling and unfair as
they sometimes appear -- necessary reflections of subterranean
currents in contemporary government and politics?

    It is difficult to invent a system under which the press can
operate on a higher ethical plane than the politicians they cover.
Rumor has always played a role in politics, but rarely have the
backstage operatives been so adroit, and so cynical, in their use
of vitriol. The nation is mired in a poison-pen era, and to
identify the culprits, the press must sometimes inadvertently mar
reputations. The role of journalism is, in part, to delve beneath
the surface and explain the causes of events. To do otherwise is
to cheat the public, the only constituency to which reporters owe
their allegiance.

    This is not to diminish the rights of Tom Foley -- or any other
public figure similarly tarred. All too often the press is
unnecessarily timid in describing the character of rumors. Using
tepid language like "unsubstantiated" or "believed to be without
foundation" to describe malicious falsehoods can suggest to the
uninformed that there may be a kernel of truth to the charges. If
there is absolutely no evidence to support a scurrilous rumor other
than the fact that prominent politicians are spreading it, far
better for the press to resort to a four-letter word that can fit
in any tabloid headline: lies. Only through such aggressive honesty
can the press sidestep the muck that is replacing real issues in
contemporary American politics.