Last Updated: May 20, 1999
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Inside the Beltway
President Clinton and Monica Lewinsky: We got it right,
but did we do it right? Are there lessons from Monica?
On Jan. 21, The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times, citing unnamed
sources close to the investigation, reported that independent counsel Kenneth
Starr was investigating President Clinton’s relationship with former White
House intern Monica Lewinsky and whether Clinton had urged her to lie about
it to lawyers for Paula Jones.
The next day ABC News, using anonymous sources, reported that Lewinsky
had saved a dress that contained evidence of an encounter with Clinton.
The New York Times was the first to report, on Feb. 6, that Clinton’s
personal secretary had told Starr she had retrieved presidential gifts
from Lewinsky, quoting lawyers “familiar with her account.”
But, in a sign of the changed media times that is emblematic of the
Clinton-Lewinsky media coverage, Internet gossip columnist Matt Drudge,
on Jan. 19, was the first to put out the news, posting an item that said
Newsweek magazine had held off publishing reporter Michael Isikoff’s story
of a Clinton affair with an intern.
On Aug. 17, Clinton told the nation he’d had an “inappropriate relationship”
with Lewinsky and his statement to Jones’ attorneys had been legally accurate
but misleading.
“President Clinton confirmed the accuracy of the story in its broad
outlines,” said Charles Lewis, Washington bureau chief for Hearst Newspapers.
“The fact is that the story as it was first reported has been validated
by subsequent events. … The White House and its diehard supporters have
used nuclear rhetoric to attack the news media for doing the story … but
wipe away the baloney, and the fact is the news media were right.”
There were two notable newspaper errors — reports that first appeared
in online editions of The Dallas Morning News and The Wall Street Journal
of witnesses to intimate encounters between Clinton and Lewinsky. But Lewis
said these two stories represented a small percentage of the coverage.
Post Executive Editor Leonard Downie said, “The rigor and the care that
we’ve taken to do it responsibly have been rewarded by events.” Associated
Press Managing Editor Jonathan Wolman called the coverage “challenging
and strong and borne out by developments.”
But a Pew Research Center for the People & the Press poll in February
found that two-thirds of the public believed the press had done a poor
or fair job in checking the facts before publishing or airing stories,
about the same percentage as said the press had done badly at being objective.
The biggest complaint was the failure to verify facts and the rush to air
or publish rumors and unsubstantiated accusations.
Michael Oreskes, Washington bureau chief of The New York Times, said
reaction toward the press is, to some degree, a reflection of the public’s
distaste for the story generally, in particular the salacious details.
But if the main facts were right, “the more important question is, ‘Did
we go about getting them the right way?’ ” said Tom Rosenstiel, director
of the Project for Excellence in Journalism.
Of particular concern to him: commentary overshadowing reporting; overuse
of anonymous sources coupled with vaguely sourced or single-sourced stories;
and the unverified use of others’ information because it’s “out there.”
Caesar Andrews, editor of Gannett News Service, agreed that much of
what was reported initially was correct, but noted newspapers didn’t do
a good job of explaining their meth-
ods, particularly the use of anonymous sources, as they asked for public
trust.
To ignore the critics because “we’re getting it right … is a decontextualized
approach,” said Deborah Tannen, linguistics professor at Georgetown University
and author of the best-selling book, “The Argument Culture: Moving from
Debate to Dialogue.” “There is a legitimate concern. I think it is dangerous
for any democratic society when there is such widespread anger at the press.
There is cause for concern.”
Rosenstiel said his group analyzed media coverage and found commentary
and reporting were “hopelessly intermingled.” Jan Schaffer, executive director
of the Pew Center for Civic Journalism, noted that “more than ever before,
journalists who were covering the story were opining on the story, being
pundits on the story. By the evening after the (Aug. 17) speech, we were
being told the apology wasn’t good enough. Who’s the arbiter of enough?
It seems to be largely pundits and often the very reporters who are covering
the story.”
Sandy Rowe, editor of The Oregonian, Portland, criticized the pervasive
role of television’s wall-to-wall talk (often provided by print reporters,
it should be noted) that formed the public’s impression of the media. “If
you took out all of the speculation and talking heads, you’d have a clearer
focus of what’s actually being reported. The garbage has overshadowed the
real reporting,” she said.
The constant focus, particularly of talk shows, on the Clinton-Lewinsky
scandal colors the public’s opinion of newspaper coverage, several editors
and media experts agreed.
“There’s real reporting, real information being gathered and published,”
said Downie. “And then there’s a lot of talk from a lot of people who don’t
know a lot about it.”
Both Andrews and Wolman noted that a relatively small group of reporters
and media outlets were involved in full-time reporting of daily developments,
yet there was a feeling, particularly from TV coverage, of “all Monica,
all the time.”
Lewis believes much of the media criticism really is directed at TV
talk shows “that masticate the story when there’s no news. They slice it,
they dice it, they push it around, but there’s nothing new.”
Unnamed Sources
Former Washington Post Ombudsman Geneva Overholser said readers questioned
both the quantity and manner of coverage. “We allowed ourselves to be used
by leakers, and we gave people cover — and encouraged their underhanded
methods — by constantly quoting people anonymously.”
Rosenstiel’s content analysis found that 40 percent of the time reporters
used anonymous sources, they relied on a single anonymous source.
James Naughton, president of the Poynter Institute for Media Studies
in St. Petersburg, Fla., pointed to the Post’s front-page story detailing
the contents of Clinton’s deposition in the Paula Jones case. “They did
not tell it to the readers in a way that was persuasive about the accuracy
of the sourcing. We’re telling things in a way that is so breathless that
it sounds like trash talk on the radio, and the reader doesn’t have a way
of distinguishing mediated from unmediated information, which is on the
Internet. If we’re not careful … we’ll be treated the way less reliable
sources of information are.”
In the deposition story, Downie said, the Post was asking readers to
trust the paper, “which is why it is very important not to make mistakes.
At the moment, I’m pleased to say to readers, look at our track record.
Everything has been shown to be accurate and fair.”
Original reporting from sources who are not named but “whose reliability
you know and whose biases are clear to you,” said Oreskes, “is a vital
service.”
Reporting What’s ‘Out There’
Many reports did not follow Oreskes’ guidelines, attributing information
to sources not necessarily known to the reporter. Naughton noted “a frenzy
of repeating information that had been said on the air or in print without
knowing where it came from as it was passed along.”
Lewis suggested one reason that media has gotten low ratings from the
public is that one story’s facts, attributed to anonymous sources, quickly
became “assumed knowledge and the attributions quickly disappeared. For
instance, the number of people who listened to the Linda Tripp tapes is
limited, but they’re part of the everyday idiom now.”
Added Oreskes: “The fact that it’s been on TV didn’t make it true. Another
news organization is just not a source. … You really go back to basics
in this kind of story. We kept repeating to ourselves: Did we know it or
did we just hear it out there? … The temptation is to become more comfortable
because others have published, and that’s a mistake. You can’t use the
fact of publication as a source.”
He noted the Times held a story that was being reported elsewhere about
a Secret Service agent or White House staffer observing something suspicious
because “we had sources we thought were too far removed from direct knowledge.”
Lessons Learned
“Being correct and being careful with correct information are two different
things, particularly in an era when credibility is an issue,” Naughton
said. “It would have been hard to ignore. It might not have been as hard
as we made it seem to cover it a bit more calmly and to wait for knowledge
instead of borrowing someone else’s.”
Tannen suggested a different frame for stories. She said overuse of
the battle metaphor in reporting, the Starr versus Clinton focus of news
reports, “makes it less likely for coverage to explore other aspects. When
everything is a debate between polarized extremes, we miss the middle.”
Rowe also said rethinking how to present “painfully incremental stories”
may help because readers don’t understand why “we’re constantly regurgitating
everything that came before. It actually hurts us on stories like this.”
Editors should be better gatekeepers for what goes in their papers and
what their reporters say on television to avoid what Rowe called “the wretched
yakking that is not reporting, not even analysis.”
Rosenstiel said the solution is for each news organization to set out
what its standards are, communicate them to the staff and the public, and
let the public decide.
Downie said that the nature of the Clinton-Lewinsky story “means that
you need to be very careful about how you handle the awful details of things,
being as tasteful as you can possibly be and not making mistakes. … I do
not worry about the popularity of the media. I do worry about the credibility
of The Washington Post.”
Oreskes also pointed to the need for careful, original reporting.
“One of the important lessons about this whole thing is that it is very
important to do your own work,” he said. “The right measure isn’t, ‘Were
you right or wrong?’ but ‘Did you have it?’ … You can’t ask the question,
‘What is ultimately true?’ Ask what do you know that you can publish.”
Shearer is co-director and editor of Medill News Service in Washington.
