Last Updated: May 26, 1999
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Lessons
When Little Rock got burned, it learned
Anonymous source had been accurate every time, but
it was when the Democrat-Gazette didn’t corroborate the story that it was
wrong. The lesson? Even if mom says it, check it out
By Griffin Smith Jr.
A newspaper never wants to make the news; it just wants to report the
news. But we don’t always get what we want. That was the position the Arkansas
Democrat-Gazette found itself in when we reported that Ken Starr’s office
had conducted mock trials of Bill and Hillary Clinton, then had to admit
that we were wrong.
The letters and phone calls keep coming, too, weeks later. Reporters
for numerous newspapers and broadcast news organizations have phoned to
ask how such a thing could have happened (while no doubt fervently hoping
it never happens to them). The American Editor even graciously offered
this space for an explanation.
And the usual conspiracy theories have been hatched. Is the newspaper
in league with the office of the independent counsel, or is it in league
with the administration? We hate to ruin a good conspiracy, but it’s neither.
Sometimes a mistake is just a mistake, and that’s what this was.
This story starts with a source. It’s rare for this newspaper to use
anonymous sources. But we realize that an anonymous source can be a valuable
reporting tool, helping us smoke out a story not available through ordinary
reporting methods. Generally, we insist that information from a source
be corroborated by a second source of information. We also want to know
whether the source obtained the information first-hand, and whether the
source is reliable.
We are not alone in applying such standards; experience and common sense
have led plenty of news organizations to the same conclusions.
So with such rules in place, what happened with the mock trials story?
We goofed, and had a bit of bad luck.
Information about the mock trial came from a source who had been reliable
in the past, helping the newspaper develop several stories in 1996. The
source was close to the action, having worked directly with the office
of the independent counsel. Even after the mock trial mistake, he was still
batting about .900.
It’s important to note, too, that another part of the mock trial story
revealed that the independent counsel was reinterviewing numerous state
troopers who had worked in Clinton’s gubernatorial administrations. The
same source was accurate on that information.
It was possible to confirm the state trooper interviews with a second
source; but unfortunately it was not possible to do that with respect to
the mock trials. Based on the reliability and accuracy of the information
previously provided by our source, we took the risk and published the mock
trial story.
This time, however, our trusted source proved to be mistaken. We said
so in a front-page story on Feb. 21, six days after the original story.
Speaking for the paper, I said then: "Our Saturday story concerning the
mock trials was obviously wrong. We relied too heavily on this source even
though the newspaper had gotten solid information from him in the past.
We made a mistake and let our readers down on this."
Our lesson? The experience underscores the perils of going with a single-source
story, even when the source has a record of reliability.
Smith has been executive editor of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
in Little Rock since 1992
