Press Handling the Clinton Affair

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

- 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."

With reporting by Elizabeth Rudulph/New York