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Text File | 1992-10-19 | 10.1 KB | 201 lines

                                                                                NATION, Page 28

PRESS 

Handling the Clinton Affair


Confronted with a tabloid's allegations and a candidate's denial,
the mainstream media reacted with unusual restraint. Why then
is the public dissatisfied?

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III -- Reported by Elizabeth Rudulph/New York


    When actor Warren Beatty addressed the American Society
of Newspaper Editors in 1983, he asked the assembled power
elite of print whether they thought their publications shared
the same standards and values as the sensational tabloids sold
in supermarkets. After the editors got over their astonishment
that anyone would pose such a question, they responded with
overwhelming denial. No rational adult, their reasoning went,
would take such twaddle seriously as a source of news. Beatty
responded that the chasm between serious reportage and junk
journalism, so vast in the editors' minds, was far narrower in
the minds of consumers -- and in the reality of what gets
printed by the mainstream press in an ever more gossip-oriented
age. Asked Beatty: "Do you think that the public knows that you
feel this? Irresponsible journalism should be pointed out by
responsible journalism."

    For the past two weeks, print and broadcast news editors
who normally scorn supermarket tabloids have struggled over how
to cover a story engineered by one, concerning a top-priority
subject: presidential politics. When the Star, its cover
splashed with scarlet, citron and purple, asserted that Gennifer
Flowers enjoyed a 12-year affair with Democratic candidate Bill
Clinton -- in an issue that also retailed movie star Harrison
Ford's "brush with death" (resulting in four stitches) and a
household "ghostbusting" by rocker Joseph McIntyre of New Kids
on the Block -- "real" journalists scoffed. The interview with
Flowers was tainted, they said, by the reported $130,000 to
$175,000 that she was paid (amply recouped via an estimated
$800,000 that her well-hyped recollections earned at
newsstands). This invasion of privacy, they added, had nothing
to do with real reporting.

    Yet even the naysayers soon felt the Star story had been
forced onto them. They might ignore it, but competitors didn't.
After Clinton appeared on the nation's top-rated TV news
program, CBS's 60 Minutes, to refute the Star while sidestepping
the question of whether he had ever committed adultery, editors
concluded that they had to highlight the issue. The challenge in
newsrooms around the country was how to inform readers without
appearing to give credence to charges that were unverifiable.
"People talk about the media as if the Star, ABC, the Eagle and
the New York Times were all the same," says Davis Merritt Jr.,
editor of the Wichita Eagle. "When we blur the lines by picking
up from the Star, we invite that very devastating comparison."

    The results of a poll conducted for TIME last week by
Yankelovich Clancy Shulman strongly suggest that Americans think
journalists should stay out of candidates' personal lives. By
a tally of 70% to 25%, a sample of 1,000 adults said information
about private behavior, including extramarital affairs, should
be kept from voters out of respect for the candidate's privacy.
The sentiment hardly varied -- it was 69% to 25% -- in the
hypothetical case that a reporter happened on hard proof. While
reporters have justified special probing of Clinton and,
previously, Gary Hart by citing rumors about them, 73% of poll
respondents said the same standards should apply to all
candidates; only 11% thought it right to concentrate on targets
of rumors. While editors often run a story citing a charge made
in another news organ, only 4% of respondents thought that was
proper; 42% said editors should check such charges first, and
50% favored ignoring them. The press pays too much attention to
personal lives, according to 82%; only 3% said too little.
Nearly half the respondents blamed media discussion of personal
lives for crowding out discussion of the issues.

    In this dustup, journalists at first followed their
gentler impulses. On the evening after the Star leaked its story
via faxes to dozens of leading journalists, NBC was the only
major network to carry an item on its newscast. At ABC, World
News Tonight anchor Peter Jennings and executive producer Paul
Friedman were more leery of the unbuttressed charges and
reluctant to credit another news organization on a topic they
too had been pursuing. Says Friedman: "We sat around joking that
after all the symposia sponsored by prestigious academic
institutions, we still have difficulty coping with what's right
and what's wrong." Network news president Roone Arledge heard
their decision to hold off. Yet hours later, the network devoted
that night's episode of Nightline to dishing the unchecked dirt
from the Star, in the guise of debating the propriety of doing
so. The rationale, as explained by anchor Ted Koppel: Clinton
himself planned to confront the issue publicly, agreeing to do
Nightline that evening before a travel snafu forced him to
cancel his trip to Washington. "It was no longer simply a
`Supermarket tabloid has charged . . .' " said Koppel. "The
Clinton campaign had already decided, and we knew that they had
decided to address the issue head on."

    Friedman and Jennings still didn't like the story. They
settled the next day for inserting two lines about the alleged
scandal into a piece by correspondent James Wooten about the
pros and cons of being the front runner. But when Clinton
appeared on CBS, the ABC executives felt obliged to do the
story.

    The nuances of how the issue was handled varied, but the
gut response almost everyplace was much the same as at ABC.
Journalists privately questioned whether Clinton's sex life was
relevant, whether Flowers was credible, whether it was fair to
scrutinize one candidate's private life more closely than the
rest. Yet they yielded to momentum. While the Washington Post
determinedly underplayed the story on inside pages at first, it
profiled Clinton on Page One on the day he and his wife Hillary
were to appear on 60 Minutes. The following day, when Flowers
held her press conference, a Post staff member was among the
300 print and electronic reporters crowded in -- a pack
comparable to the entire national press corps covering New
Hampshire's primary.

    At the Los Angeles Times, national editor Norman Miller
recalls he "felt sick" when political editor Roger Smith brought
over a faxed copy of the Star story. "Because there was a
background of charges relating to Clinton's personal behavior,
which he had addressed in less than categorical ways, we had to
publish. We put it in context and played it low key. Everyone
was in agreement, almost instantly, that this was what we had
to do." The story ran about 800 words inside the paper. But the
issue moved to Page One after 60 Minutes. The Times also sent
reporters to Little Rock to investigate Flowers and check
whether Clinton improperly helped her get her state job, as the
Star alleged in yet another story at week's end. Says Miller:
"I hate these stories. But they are there." Concurs
editorial-page editor Thomas Plate: "In story conferences there
was real unease, but there wasn't anyone suggesting this was not
a story."

    The editors who gathered around the city desk at the
Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, Clinton's hometown paper, had a sense
of deja vu. Says managing editor John Starr: "We knew about
allegations since October 1990, but we ignored them. We did, the
other paper did, the TV stations did. Now here are tapes
indicating that this woman has been speaking with the Governor
in a way no married man should permit another woman to talk with
him on the telephone." So the paper put a dozen reporters on the
story. That bore fruit within hours: a story poking holes in
Flowers' testimony ran in the same edition as the allegations.

    The most conspicuous resistance to the story came from the
New York Times, which relegated it to short shrift on back
pages even after 60 Minutes. Says executive editor Max Frankel:
"We had been meeting over the months on the issue of privacy,
with long discussions on whether we are in the business of
covering the sex lives of candidates and about how far we go in
other privacy matters." He denies being affected by the outcry
over an investigative profile last year of Patricia Bowman, the
woman who alleged that she was raped by William Kennedy Smith.

    Smaller papers have also been struggling to halt invasion
of privacy. At the Wichita Eagle, editor Merritt decided in
1990 to change coverage to compel gubernatorial candidates to
speak to the issues and ``get off the crap sound-bite kind of
campaigns." The paper polled a thousand readers and nonreaders
before and after the campaign and concluded that readers had
greatly enhanced understanding of issues while nonreaders did
not. Says Merritt: "We are convinced that the appetite is out
there for the kind of journalism all of us would like to do on
campaigns. If a candidate is running around answering questions
about this kind of stuff, we can't pretend that's not happening.
But we can play it for what we think it's worth, which is not
very much."

    Politically, perhaps the most important coverage will
prove to be in New Hampshire. If Clinton survives, most pundits
will accept that the public has spoken on the issue. But the
Star dominated coverage there for nearly a week, depriving all
candidates of the chance to promote issue-oriented messages.
Said former Democratic Party chairman John White: "Your first
instinct is to think there's an opening, but other candidates
were really disadvantaged by this trash too. It just sucked up
all the oxygen in the room." Co-anchor Cathy Burnham of the
state's leading television outlet, WMUR, wryly acknowledged that
fact last week as she introduced a story on Senator Bob Kerrey's
health-care ideas. "And now," she said, minutes into the
newscast's political coverage, "let's try to get to the issues."