[Congressional Record Volume 144, Number 84 (Wednesday, June 24, 1998)]
[House]
[Pages H5252-H5267]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
CONTROVERSIAL ARTICLE REGARDING KENNETH W. STARR, INDEPENDENT COUNSEL
The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the
gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Conyers) is recognized for 5 minutes.
[[Page H5253]]
Mr. CONYERS. Mr. Speaker, I will place in the Record an article that
has become controversial in the fact that it begins to examine more
carefully the question surrounding the Independent Counsel, Kenneth W.
Starr, in connection with his off-the-record contacts with Members of
the media. I ask that this material be included.
The material referred to is as follows:
[From Brill's Content, July/August 1998]
Pressgate
(By Steven Brill)
What makes the media's performance a true scandal, a true
example of an institution being corrupted to its core, is
that the competition for scoops so bewitched almost everyone
that they let the man in power write the story--once Tripp
and Goldberg put it together for him.
It began with high fives over the telephone. ``It's
breaking! It's breaking! We've done it,'' Lucianne Goldberg
screamed into her phone in Manhattan to her son in
Washington. It was 7:00 A.M., Wednesday, January 21.
``This was my mom's day,'' says Jonah Goldberg, 29,
referring to the controversial New York literary agent who
had now shepherded the Monica Lewinsky story into the world's
headlines and onto Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr's radar
screen. ``Here was everything we'd done since the fall
breaking right there on Good Morning America, with Sam
Donaldson standing in front of the White House and George
Stephanopoulos talking . . . impeachment.''
``For five years I had had all kinds of Clinton stories
that I had tried to peddle,'' Lucianne Goldberg recalled
during a series of interviews. ``Stories from the state
troopers, from other women, you name it. And for five years I
couldn't get myself arrested. Now I was watching this [and] I
was lovin' it. Spikey and Linda and us had really done it.''
``Spikey'' is Lucianne Goldberg's pet name for Michael
Isikoff, the relentless Newsweek reporter whose stories about
President Clinton's alleged sexual misconduct--from Paula
Jones to Kathleen Willey and now to Monica Lewinsky--had led
the way on this sometime lonely beat. ``Linda'' is Linda
Tripp, the onetime White House secretary now known more for
taping than typing. For four years she had been a frustrated
client of Goldberg's, hoping to sell a White House scandal
memoir.
As of this morning, Tripp, under Lucianne Goldbergs'
tutelage, had constructed the material for Isikoff's greatest
scoop--often according to his probably unwitting
specifications. The two women had even steered it in a way
that now allowed Ken Starr to hone in on the president and
the intern. Then, by leaking the most damaging details of the
investigation to a willing, eager press corps Starr was able
to create an almost complete presumption of guilt. Indeed,
the self-righteousness with which Starr approached his role--
and the way he came to be able to count on the press's
partnership in it--generated a hubris so great that, as
detailed below, he himself will admit these leaks when asked.
The abuses that were Watergate spawned great reporting. The
Lewinsky story has reversed the process. Here, an author in
quest of material teamed up with a prosecutor in quest of a
crime, and most of the press became a cheering section for
the combination that followed. As such, the Lewinsky saga
raises the question of whether the press has abandoned its Watergate
glory of being a check on official abuse of power. For in this story
the press seems to have become an enabler of Starr's abuse of power.
An examination of the Lewinsky story's origins and a day-
by-day review of the first three weeks of the media coverage
that followed, suggest that as it has careened from one badly
sourced scoop to another in an ever more desperate need to
feed its multimedia, 24-hour appetite, the press has
abandoned its treasured role as a skeptical ``fourth
estate.'' This story marks such a fundamental change in the
press's role that the issues it raises will loom long after
we determine (if we ever do) whether the president is guilty
of a sexual relationship with the intern, obstruction of
justice, or both.
looking for a true crime story
It started with the 1993 death of Deputy White House
Counsel Vincent Foster, Jr. In some anti-Clinton circles,
Foster's suicide became what Lucianne Goldberg calls ``the
best true crime story out there. . . . I was interested in
getting a book out about Foster's death, and Tony Snow [the
conservative columnist and now--Fox newsman] suggested I talk
to Linda Tripp.''
A veteran government secretary, Tripp, then 43, had been
assigned to work for White House Counsel Bernard Nussbaum.
Tripp claimed to have been the last person to see Foster
alive, and, as with many aspects of her jobs, she made more
of this Jeopardy-like fact than it was worth.
Following Nussbaum's resignation in 1994, Tripp was moved
to a job at the Pentagon. She got a rise, but, in terms of
status, it was a comedown.
Goldberg was a good match for Tripp. A gravelly-voiced,
chain-smoking 63 year-old with a self-described ``big
mouth,'' Goldberg is a West Side Manhattanite who takes
delight in defying her neighborhood's liberal chic. She runs
in conservative circles, makes no secret of her disdain for
the president, and her acknowledged past includes doing dirty
tricks for the Nixon campaign.
Yet the reception Tripp got from Goldberg was a letdown.
``She had been the last person to see Vince Foster, and she
hated the Clinton people and told me stories about the
clothes they wore and how they f--ked around with each other.
. . . But was that a book? Come on,'' says Goldberg.
``I kinda liked her,'' Goldberg continues. ``So we kept in
touch, and we did put a proposal together.''
As The New Yorker reported in a February article by Jane
Mayer that deserves credit for being the first to spot the
Goldberg--book deal impetus for the Tripp-Lewinsky story, the
proposal contained a purported but nonspecific chapter on
sexual hijinks.
the ``pretty girl''
In May of 1996, Tripp told Goldberg about a former White
House interim who had been transferred to the Pentagon and
was working with Tripp in the public affairs office. ``One
day Linda called and told me about what she called ``the
pretty girl,'' who'd become `` her friend,'' Goldberg
recalls. ``She said the pretty girl said she had a boyfriend
in the White House. Linda was excited. This might be
material.''
``A few weeks later,'' says Goldberg, ``Linda told me the
pretty girl's name [Monica Lewinsky] and said the boyfriend
was Clinton.''
But, says Goldberg, ``even with proof, which she didn't
have, it was just another Clinton girlfriend story. Maybe the
girlfriend could do a book, but not Linda.''
``I remember for a while my mom thinking Linda could get us
Monica as a client.'' says Jonah Goldberg, a television
producer who also runs a Washington office for his mother.
Nonetheless, according to the two Goldbergs, Tripp
repeatedly rebuffed their hints that they meet the former
intern.
Although Tripp and Lucianne Goldberg kept up their
relationship through 1996, Goldberg did not push the book
idea. ``It wasn't high on my list,'' says Goldberg. ``No one
seemed to care about this guy screwing everything in sight.''
on the radar screen
Perceptions about the president and sex changed markedly as
1997 began. In January, Newsweek published a cover story on
the Paula Jones suit declaring that the case deserved to be
taken seriously. The Newsweek story--along with the Supreme
Court's hearing (also in January) of the Jones lawyers'
appeal that their case not be delayed until after President
Clinton had left office--suddenly made the president's
alleged sexual misconduct and his resulting legal troubles
topic A.
isikoff on the hunt
Newsweek now allowed Isikoff, its lead reporter on the
Jones story, to add the Clinton sex allegations to a beat
that already included not only Whitewater, but also the
blossoming controversy surrounding the funding of the 1996
Democratic campaign.
A native New Yorker who grew up on Long Island, Isikoff,
46, started in journalism as a reporter for a Washington-
based news service initially funded by Ralph Nader. ``It was
the Woodward and Bernstein era,'' he says. ``Being a reporter
was exciting.''
For him, it still is. A journalist's version of Columbo,
with a perpetually whiny voice and a awkward, nervous look.
Isikoff instinctively distrusts power. Now, as he patrolled
his expanded beat in early 1997, Isikoff got a tip from one
of Jones's lawyers, who had heard that there was a
volunteer White House worker who had been groped by the
president in 1993 when she'd met with him seeking a job.
Isikoff eventually tracked down Kathleen Willey, and after
he had pestered her over a period of several months, she
talked about the incident but refused to be quoted. According
to Isikoff. Willey suggested that he ``go ask Linda Tripp''
for confirmation, because Tripp had seen Willey after she'd
left the Oval Office on the day of the alleged incident.
Yes, she had seen Willey emerge from the Oval Office
disheveled, Tripp told Isikoff, according to his subsequent
story. And yes, Willey claimed the president had kissed her
and fondled her. But, no, Tripp declared, Willey was not
upset; she seemed happy about the president's attention.
Isikoff says that he and his editors were reluctant to go
with that confusing account, until they learned in late July
that the Jones lawyers had subpoenaed Willey (but not Tripp,
whom they did now know about). Now Newsweek had a hook--a
legitimate more-than-just-sex hook--for the story.
The result, entitled ``A Twist In Jones v. Clinton,'' was a
tortured account of the potential role that a new but
reluctant accuser, Kathleen Willey, might have in the Jones
case. Isikoff quoted Tripp as confirming the incident but
disputing whether Willey had seemed unhappy about it.
In the days that followed, Isikoff says, he was surprised
that the rest of the press largely ignored the article,
seeing it as just part of the detritus of the Smarmy Jones
suit.
Linda Tripp did not ignore it.
``Linda tends to view her role in things as much more
important than it is,'' says Jonah Goldberg, ``And she was
both thrilled and terrified by the play Isikoff gave her in
this piece. She thought the whole world was now watching her.
And she thought she also could now come to center stage with
what she knew about Monica.''
In fact, according to Isikoff, from the moment he had first
talked to Tripp in March
[[Page H5254]]
1997 about Willey, ``she was telling me that I had the right
idea but that I was barking up the wrong tree with Kathleen
Willey. She kind of steered me away from Willey.''
At a meeting in a bar near the White House in April 1997,
Tripp again pushed Isikoff to consider a better story, one
about an intern and the president. But Isikoff remained
focused on Willey. Why? Because, he says, he knew that there
was a link from her to a story that was about more than sex:
the Jones trial. He also says that he made no bones about the
importance of that link to Tripp.
For Tripp, the motive for filling that need was
unambiguous. ``I always told Linda that for her to have a
real book deal she had to get some of what she knew into a
mainstream publication of some kind,'' recalls Goldberg. ``I
drummed that into her. Without that, she was just another
kook.''
According to Goldberg, it was soon after the Newsweek
article appeared that Tripp--at Goldberg's urging--went to a
Radio Shack store and bought a $100 tape recorder so that she
could begin gathering her proof.
The Tapes
In October, the Goldbergs tried to advance the story by
getting Isikoff to listen to Tripp's tapes of Lewinsky
talking to her about sex with Clinton. Saying she was
Tripp's ``media adviser,'' as Isikoff recalls it, Goldberg
invited him to a meeting at Jonah Goldberg's apartment.
She told him he wouldn't regret it.
According to all who were present (except Tripp, who would
not comment for this article), Isikoff was told Lewinsky's
name. Two tapes were on the coffee table. Lucianne offered to
queue up the first one.
Isikoff declined.
``I knew that if I listened to these tapes I would become
part of the process, because I knew the taping was ongoing,''
explains Isikoff, who also adds that he was in a hurry to get
to CNBC, where he was a paid Clinton sex scandal pundit.
get me something tangible
But Isikoff heard enough of a description of what was on
the tape to request more. He wanted ``a tangible way to check
this out with some other source,'' recalls Jonah Goldberg.
``And he needed more than just sex. He said he needed other
sources and he needed for this to relate to something
official.'' Isikoff confirms this conversation.
To Isikoff, he was simply musing aloud about what would
make a legitimate Newsweek story. To the Goldbergs and Tripp,
he was writing out specs. And by the end of October,
Isikoff's hopes had been fulfilled on both counts.
First, they produced something tangible. Lewinsky began
sending letters and one package to presidential secretary
Betty Currie at the White House, allegedly so that Currie
could pass them to the president. What was in that package?
Tripp and Goldberg told Isikoff it contained a lurid sex
tape. Goldberg then told Isikoff how to get copies of the
receipts for those letters and the package. It was easy--
because the courier service employed by Lewinsky is owned by
Goldberg's brother's family.
``We told Linda to suggest that Monica use a courier
service to send love letters to the president,'' says
Lucianne Goldberg. ``And we told her what courier service to
use. Then we told Spikey [Isikoff] to call the service.''
(Isikoff says he later found out that the service was
owned by Goldberg's brother's family, but that for him the
only issue was the fact that Lewinsky had, indeed, sent
the letters and, one case, a package that seemed like a
tape, according to the courier who delivered it to the
White House--and who was made available for Isikoff to
interview by the eager-to-be-helpful courier service.)
As for something ``official,'' Tripp and Lucianne Goldberg
told Isikoff that Lewinsky, who was planning to move to New
York with her mother, was going to get a job there working
for U.N. ambassador Bill Richardson. In fact, Richardson
himself was going to meet with the lowly former intern at the
Watergate over breakfast in a few days to talk about the job,
Tripp and Goldberg reported. In other words, they contended,
the president was getting his girlfriend a government job.
``That was interesting enough that we sent a reporter--not
me, because I was now recognizable from all my TV stuff--to
stake out the Watergate for breakfast,'' says Isikoff.
Newsweek's Daniel Klaidman waited from 7:00 until 11:30
a.m., But Richardson and Lewinsky never appeared. ``That
really worried my editors. . . . We didn't know that
Richardson had an apartment there and they were meeting
there,'' says Isikoff.
It was at about this time--October 1997--that the new Paula
Jones legal team started getting anonymous calls from a woman
saying that Linda Tripp and Monica Lewinsky would be well
worth subpoenas. Each of what one member of the Jones team
estimates were three or four calls got increasingly less
vague.
Who made those calls?
``My mom didn't do it,'' Jonah Goldberg says. ``Linda did,
but I can tell you that she didn't get the idea on her own.''
Lucianne Goldberg says she isn't sure Linda called them,
``but it wouldn't surprise me, and it made sense, didn't
it?''
Did Lucianne encourage her to make the calls? ``Do you
think I had to?'' asks Goldberg.
Did she encourage her? ``Not exactly, but, hell, I guess
you could say so.''
What seems clear is that no one other than one of the
Goldbergs or Tripp would have had the knowledge or the motive
to have tipped off the Jones lawyers. And whoever made the
calls, they were persuasive enough that by just before
Christmas both Lewinsky and Tripp had been subpoenaed.
``That's when this heated up,'' says Isikoff. ``When I
found out they had been subpoenaed, I could see the perjury
possibilities and everything else. It was starting to be a
real story.''
In short, the exact dynamic that had made the Willey tale a
publishable story for Isikoff--that it was part of the Jones
trial--had now apparently been engineered by the Goldberg-
Tripp book-deal team. Moreover, those similarly orchestrated
``receipts'' from the courier service gave Isikoff the
tangible proof he said he needed.
``I guess I'd like to think this was more a Goldberg
conspiracy than a right-wing conspiracy,'' Jonah concludes
when asked about this orchestration.
monica becomes hysterical
According to the Goldbergs' accounts of the Lewinsky-Tripp
tapes and to Isikoff's account of the tapes he eventually
heard, when Lewinsky got her subpoena in December she became
hysterical. On the tapes her hysteria comes off as a fear of
how to decide whether to rat on the president or risk
perjury--a fear exacerbated by Tripp's declaration to her
that she, Tripp, was going to tell the truth about what
Lewinsky had told her about the relationship.
As 1997 drew to a close, Isikoff says he knew he'd be
coming back from his Christmas vacation in January to what
night be a major story.
`clowns in a car'
``That first week in January,'' recalls Lucianne Goldberg,
``we were kind of panicked. You had [Lewinsky] on the phone
to Linda . . . saying she didn't know what to do and that she
was gonna sign an affidavit saying she had never had any sex
with the president''--an affidavit that Lewsinsky did in fact
sign on January 7. ``And you had Linda worried about her own
testimony and about what Isikoff was going to do.''
Goldberg says the Tripp was now worried enough to consult
Kirby Behre, the lawyer she had used when she had testified
in the Whitewater hearings. But when Behre (who declined all
public comment for this article) was told about the tapes,
his suggestion, according to Goldberg, shocked Tripp and
Goldberg: ``He told her he was going to go to Bob Bennett''--
the president's defense lawyer in the Jones case--``. . . and
get Bennett to settle the Jones case and avoid all this.''
In fact, Tripp and the Goldbergs wanted anything but a
settlement that would see Tripp's cameo role in history
evaporate. They were headed in the opposite direction. What
they had pushed from a tale about a presidential affair to a
story about a new witness in a civil suit they now wanted to
push to the next stop--a criminal case. ``We wanted a [new]
lawyer so that Linda could go to Ken Starr,'' explains
Lucianne Goldberg.
By Friday, January 9, Goldberg had found James Moody, a
relatively unknown Washington attorney who had been active in
taxpayer rights and other conservative causes.
tripp goes to starr
Why the rush for a new lawyer? ``Because we wanted someone
to get the tapes back from Behre so we could take them to
Starr,'' says Lucianne Goldberg.
In fact, while Moody ended up getting the tapes back
quickly (apparently by Monday, January 12), even that wasn't
fast enough for Tripp. ``Linda,'' says Jonah Goldberg, ``was
in a frenzy.''
``I told her to call Starr Monday night,'' says Lucianne
Goldberg. ``She was afraid Isikoff was going to do a story
and she wanted to make sure who got to Starr first . . .
Neither of us wanted Starr to read about her in Newsweek. We
wanted to be at the center of it.''
But didn't her going to Starr also insure that Isikoff
would have a story? ``Yes, that's true, too,'' says Goldberg
with a laugh. ``We knew this would never not be a story for
Spikey [Isikoff] once Starr had it.''
``Linda called Starr's people Monday night,'' Goldberg
continues. ``And after a few minutes they asked her where she
was, told her to stay there, and piled in a car and drove out
to her house. She told me it was like that Charlie Chaplin
movie or something with all those cops like clowns stuffed
into a car coming out to see her . . . We never knew they
would pounce like that.''
Starr says that his staff spent that night and the next
day, Tuesday, January 13, debriefing Tripp.
According to Goldberg--who was in contact with Tripp
through Wednesday night, January 14--Starr's lawyers and FBI
agents told Tripp that they needed more than was on her tapes
to prove both the president's alleged effort to get Lewinsky
to lie and Washington lawyer and Clinton friend Vernon
Jordan's supposed obstruction of justice, via his help
getting a job for Lewinsky. Their plan? They wanted Tripp to
meet with Lewinsky and wear a wire while she walked Lewinsky
through a conversation that they would script.
Getting more about Jordan on tape was crucial for Starr.
Because his office had been established to investigate
Whitewater, his people had already concluded that extending
their jurisdiction to the Lewinsky affair required their
arguing that Jordan's role with Lewinsky paralleled his
suspected but unproven role in helping disgraced former
[[Page H5255]]
Associate Attorney General Webster Hubbell obtain lucrative
consulting assignments in exchange for Hubbell's remaining
silent about the Clintons and Whitewater.
On Tuesday, Goldberg or Tripp (Goldberg and Isikoff won't
say who) called Isikoff and told him that Tripp had gone to
Starr and that Starr was planning to do his own taping of
Lewinsky. ``That call knocked my breath out,'' says Isikoff.
On Wednesday, Isikoff got a full report from Goldberg
(according to both) and prepared to confront Starr's office
the next day with what he knew.
the sting
Later that night, says Goldberg, Tripp told her that
``Starr's people were shutting her down . . . she was being
moved and her phone number was being changed and all that.''
Isikoff says that when he talked to Starr deputy Jackie
Bennett, Jr., on Thursday, Bennett begged him to wait until
Friday before tying to call Jordan, the White House, or
Lewinsky about his story. Why? Because Starr was not only
going to confront Lewinsky with the new tape his team had
just recorded of her and Tripp as they met in a dining room
at the Ritz-Carlton, Pentagon City (in Arlington); they were
also going to try to get Lewinsky to wire herself and get
Jordan and maybe even the president on tape obstructing
justice. Isikoff says he agreed to hold off in exchange
for getting a full report on how the stings had gone.
Bennett refuses to comment on any discussion he had with
Isikoff, except to say that ``what Isikoff knew put us in
a difficult position.''
Also on Thursday, Starr's deputies met in the afternoon
with Deputy Attorney General Eric Holder to request that
Attorney General Janet Reno expand Starr's authority beyond
Whitewater to include charges of an attempt to cover up
Lewinsky's affair with the president. Again, their hook to
Whitewater was Jordan's supposed role, a role that was murky
at best on the original Tripp tapes.
Now, according to Bennett and to a Justice Department
official, the Starr people talked about their own tapes of
Tripp and Lewinsky, though no tapes were played at the
meeting with Holder.
According to the Justice Department source, while Starr
deputy Bennett made much of Jordan's job hunt for Lewinsky,
he failed to mention what he knew from the earlier Tripp
tapes--that Jordan had begun offering that help at least a
month before Lewinsky was subpoenaed in the Jones case.
Bennett says he does not remember ``if I mentioned that.''
Bennett does confirm that he mentioned repeatedly that
Newsweek was working on an article that would be public by
Sunday. ``This was meant as a way of explaining why we had to
act fast,'' says a Justice Department participant. ``But the
way he said it and kept saying it, it also was clear to us
that if we turned down the request, Newsweek would know about
that, too. We had no choice.''
Another reason that Reno was in a bind was that under the
independent counsel law, Starr could have appealed a turndown
to the mostly conservative three-judge panel that had
appointed him in the first place. That probably would have
meant that Starr would have gotten his jurisdiction after
all, while Reno got a story in Newsweek saying she had
rejected it.
On Friday afternoon, January 16, Reno approved the
expansion of Starr's jurisdiction.
Also on Friday, Tripp met again with Lewinsky at the Ritz-
Carlton in Arlington, where FBI agents and Starr deputies
descended on the former intern. They stayed with her until
late that night trying to get her--and later, her and her
lawyer, William Ginsburg (who was conferring with them by
telephone)--to agree to help them get Jordan and the
president on tape in exchange for immunizing her from a
perjury prosecution for having sworn in an affidavit in the
Jones case that she and Clinton had not had a sexual
relationship. No agreement was reached.
Starr Begs Newsweek
That snag in dealing with Lewinsky forced Starr's people to
bet Isikoff to hold off until Saturday before trying to call
anyone whom his story would implicate. Any call by Isikoff to
the White House or to Jordan asking about the former intern
would kill any chance of Jordan or the president being stung
by her. ``You want to report what you know,'' Isikoff says.
``But you don't want to influence what happens.'' Isikoff
agreed to wait until Saturday (his deadline was Saturday
evening), but admits, ``This was making me crazy. How was I
gonna reach Jordan on a Saturday?''
It was also not clear on Friday that Newsweek was going to
run any story at all. ``New York was sounding like they
thought this wasn't enough,'' says Isikoff, referring to
Newsweek New York-based top editors.
``Friday night, Spikey called and told me there was some
problems,'' Goldberg recalls. ``But he said it looked like
they would to with it.''
Soon after that call, Isikoff finally hears some of the
original tapes. According to Lucianne and Jonah Goldberg and
one source at Newsweek in a position to know, at 12:30 a.m.
on Saturday, Tripp's new lawyer, Moody, showed up at the
Newseek offices with two tapes that he had selected because,
he told the Newseek staffers, they most pertained to Jordan
and a possible cover-up.
``I had to fight with Moody until the last minute to let
Newsweek hear those tapes,'' says Goldberg. ``He just didn't
get it,'' Moody says he ``never played any tapes for
Newsweek,'' but declined to comment on the account by the
Goldbergs or the Newsweek source that he made the tapes
available for them to play.
Lucianne Goldberg says that at her direction, Moody
selected the tapes that would most implicate Jordan and the
president in obstructing justice, because they contained the
non-sex material that Isikoff said he needed to publish a
story.
Iskoff, along with Washington bureau chief Ann McDaniel,
deputy bureau chief Evan Thomas, and investigative
correspondent Daniel Klaidman, listened for four hours as
Lewinsky talked and cried and complained about a man whom she
called names like ``the big creep,'' but who she clearly
meant was the president. The sexual talk was explicit, and it
did not seem contrived.
``We were all pretty convinced,'' says Thomas. ``Within
five or ten minutes it was clear to everybody that this was
compelling stuff.''
Nonetheless, Isikoff concedes that the material they
had hoped for about Jordan or the president being
complicit in an obstruction of justice just wasn't there.
``What we didn't have here was Monica saying, `Clinton told
me to lie,' '' says Isikoff. ``In fact there is one passage
where Linda, knowing the tape is going, says, `He knows
you're going to lie; you've told him, haven't you?' She seems
like she's trying to get Monica to say it. But Monica says
no.'' That, concludes Isikoff, ``made New York real queasy
when we told them.''
Unknown to Isikoff, while he was listening to the tapes,
Tripp had been released by Starr's investigators so that she
could go home. Waiting for her there were Jones's lawyers--
who were scheduled to question President Clinton the next
morning in a deposition. Starr would later tell me that he
did not know why she was released from her extensive
debriefing at that particular time.
Thus, the president's criminal inquisitors, having just
finished with Tripp, had now made it possible for his civil
case opponents to be given ammunition with which to question
the president in his sworn testimony--from which Starr, in
turn, might then be able to extract evidence of criminal
perjury.
And we now know that the next morning President Clinton was
questioned as closely about Monica Lewinsky as he was about
Paula Jones.
On Saturday morning, Klaidman of Newsweek found out that
Starr had gotten authorization from the Justice Department to
expand his investigation to include Lewinsky. ``That tipped
me off the fence,'' says deputy Washington bureau chief
Thomas. ``Just that was a story.''
Isikoff, Thomas, and Klaidman were now pushing New York to
publish. Meantime, Starr's people again begged Isikoff to
hold off, but for a few hours, then for another week.
``What followed,'' says Isikoff, ``was an incredible seven-
hour dialogue. It went back and forth. I couldn't believe we
were still debating this when I've got to try to reach Vernon
Jordan.''
``spiked''
At about 5:00 p.m. Newsweek chairman and editor in chief
Richard Smith decided to hold the story. Smith's decision, he
says, was based on three factors: an uneasiness with what
they had heard and not heard about Jordan on the tapes, their
inability to question Lewinsky directly, and an inclination
to take Starr up on his offer of waiting and not impeding the
investigation while also getting a better story. ``Hell, it's
not like this was the Bay of Pigs,'' says Isikoff, who argued
against delay. ``We don't have any obligation to work with
the government. This was as much a story about Starr as
anything else. And we knew that part cold.''
``We talked about just doing an item on the expanded
investigation [without naming Lewinsky], but we thought we
knew too much for that,'' says Smith. ``It wouldn't have been
leveling with our readers.''
Goldberg says that she learned from Isikoff at about 6:00
that the story was killed. At 1:11 A.M. on Sunday, Internet
gossip columnist Matt Drudge (who the prior summer had
spilled the beans on his website when Isikoff's Willey story
had been delayed) sent out a bulletin: Newsweek had spiked an
Isikoff story about a presidential affairs with an intern.
Drudge's report made Lewinsky radioactive. She could no
longer be used to sting Jordan or the president, and the
immunity negotiations here lawyer was having that night with
Starr abruptly ended.
Who leaked to Drudge? Although Lucianne Goldberg concedes
readily that she took a call from Drudge that night and
confirmed everything that Drudge knew, she adamantly denies
being his original source and offers an elaborate recitation
of the circumstance and time of her conversation with Drudge
that evening.
``Besides,'' she adds, ``what Drudge reported wasn't really
complete; there was nothing about the sting.''
Which is true, but it's also a giveaway, because if fact
Goldberg had no way of knowing about the planned sting of the
president and Jordan, which means that she seems a likely
source. Asked about that, Goldberg laughs and says, ``I'm
sticking to my story.''
As for Drudge, he supplied a similarly detailed explanation
of why his source was not Goldberg.
``It would make sense for my mom to have talked to
Drudge,'' says Jonah Goldberg.
[[Page H5256]]
``She really was mad that Newsweek was killing it and she
didn't believe [Newsweek] would print it the next week. So,
she may . . . be afraid to admit it because the leak seemed
to blow up in Starr's face even though she had not way of
knowing that at the time.''
Actually, the leak did work for Linda Tripp and the
Goldbergs. For it assured that the Newsweek story would be
anything but buried.
sunday gossip
At 10:30 Sunday morning, William Kristol, the editor and
publisher of the conservative Weekly Standard (and Dan
Quayle's former chief of staff), who is a regular panelist on
ABC's Sunday morning show This Week with Sam Donaldson &
Cokie Roberts, became the first person to mention the intern
scandal on any outlet beyond Drudge. Toward the end of the
program, Kristol said: ``The story in Washington this
morning is that Newsweek magazine was going to go with a
big story based on tape-recorded conversations, which
[involve] a woman who was a summer intern at the White
House.''
Former Clinton aide George Stephanopoulos, also an ABC
pundit, interrupted and said, ``And Bill, where did it come
from--the Drudge Report?''
As Kristol began to answer, Sam Donaldson jumped in, with
what would turn out to be one of the rare moments in the
whole intern affair of a TV reporter exercising good on-air
instincts: ``I'm not an apologist for Newsweek,'' Donaldson
said, drowning out Kristol with his trademark voice, ``but if
their editors decided they didn't have it cold enough to go
with, I don't think we can here.''
``I hadn't heard anything about Drudge or anything else
about this story,'' Donaldson would later recall. ``I just
decided we shouldn't go on our air with a story that Newsweek
had decided it couldn't go with.''
But the story had now moved far beyond Drudge, and the race
was on to get there first.
The principal contestants were Jackie Judd, a general
assignment correspondent for ABC, and Susan Schmidt of the
Washington Post, with Time and the Los Angeles Times also in
the hunt. What Judd and Schmidt had in common with Isikoff
was that they had been covering Whitewater--and Ken Starr and
his deputies--for years, when almost everyone else was
ignoring that beat. Schmidt recalls that the previous Friday
she had ``heard from sources in Starr's office something
about Vernon Jordan and coaching a witness.'' The Drudge
item, she says, gave her ``more direction.''
``By Tuesday mid-day, Sue Schmidt came to me with an
outline of the story,'' recalls Washington Post executive
editor Leonard Downie. ``We still waited late into the
afternoon and evening,'' he adds. ``It wasn't anything we
were missing as much as what would make us feel better. We
have a high threshold on private lives around here.''
Downie and the Post's top editors stayed through the
evening, missing the deadline for the paper's first edition
at about 9:00 because they still weren't comfortable. Then,
says Downie, Peter Baker, Schmidt's reporting partner on this
beat, ``reached the wonderful Mr. Ginsburg, who gave us an
on-the-record quote about the investigation, including the
classic quote about the president either being a misogynist
or Starr having ravaged Monica's life.''
The article finally ran in the second edition, using the
words ``sources'' or ``sources'' 11 times.
Citing ``sources'' who could only be people in Starr's
office, the article's fifth paragraph said that Lewinsky can
be heard on Tripp's tapes describing ``Clinton and Jordan
directing her to testify falsely.''
That is exactly the material that had been missing from the
tapes that Newsweek heard, which, in part, had caused the
magazine to hold its story, as Isikoff concedes. And,
remember, Tripp's lawyer had selected what he said were the
most incriminating tapes for Newsweek to hear that night.
Which means that this damning material was either on the
new tapes that Tripp had just made of Lewinsky for Starr the
prior week, or it is the Starr side's extreme spin on the
tapes Newsweek heard.
This is not a minor point: The charge that Lewinsky had
been instructed to lie was not only the linchpin of Starr's
expanded jurisdiction, but would also be the nub of any
impeachment action against the president--and the premise of
all of the front-page stories and hours of talk show dialogue
that would follow that speculated about impeachment. That
such charges would stem secondhand--from one person's talking
on a tape about what other people had said to her--is weak
enough. Weaker still is that the only tapes heard by any
reporters clearly didn't say that. In fact, they seemed to
say just the opposite. The tapes, if any, that do have
Lewinsky claiming she had been told to lie were based on a
script provided by prosecutors and not heard by any
independent party to verify if Lewinsky had said so, or if
she was led too far into saying it.
have that scotch
Lanny Davis, then a White House counsel in charge of
dealing with press inquires related to the various
investigations of the president, recalls that at about 9:00
that Tuesday night, January 20, he returned a call to the
White House from Peter Baker of the Post: ``I told him he was
interrupting a good scotch. He said `You're gonna need that
scotch.' Then he laid it all out for me. It was
breathtaking.''
Davis drove back to the White House, where he and other top
aides assembled in White House Counsel Charles Ruff's office
and waited for a messenger to bring then the Post from its
loading dock a few blocks away. By the time the Post came out
on its website at 12:30 A.M., ``all hell broke loose on
my pager,'' Davis recalls. ``It was surreal. Everyone was
calling, and meanwhile Clinton is right below us in the
Oval [Office] with [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin]
Netanyahu.''
Over at ABC, Jackie Judd's story was ready for the 11:30
P.M. Nightline broadcast, which meant she would have beaten
the Post. But Nightline host Ted Koppel, who was in Cuba
doing a special on the Pope's visit, decided to hold it
rather than shoehorn it in at the last minute.
Later that night, Judd managed to get the story onto the
ABC radio network (as well as its overnight television news
show and its website) and then led with it on Good Morning
America the next morning--which is what caused Lucianne
Goldberg to whoop into the phone on January 21.
From that point, says Bob Woodward, the Washington Post
reporter who teamed up with Carl Bernstein in Watergate,
there was ``a frenzy unlike anything you ever saw in
Watergate . . . We need to remember that for the first eight
or nine months of Watergate, there were only six reporters
working on it full time.''
What follows is a log of the first--and most furious--three
weeks of that frenzy. It should be read with one often-over-
looked reality in mind: All of it--every bulletin, every hour
of talk radio, every segment of cable news specials, every
Jay Leno joke, every website page, every Congressional
pronouncement--would be based on a woman looking for a book
deal who had surreptitiously taped some of her conversations
with a 23-year-old ``friend'' whom none of the reporters or
pundits had talked to.
Day 1: Wednesday 1/21/98
the Speculators:
Jackie Judd's 7:00 A.M. Good Morning America report is a
bombshell. Citing ``a source,'' Judd says Lewinsky can be
heard on a tape claiming the president told her to deny an
affair and that Jordan ``instructed her to lie.'' Again,
those can't be the tapes Tripp made on her own, because
Newsweek would have heard that.
Switching to the pundits, ABC's Stephanopoulos, the former
Clinton aide, seconds a notion brought up five minutes
earlier by Sam Donaldson, saying: ``There's no question that
. . . if [the allegations] are true . . . it could lead to
impeachment proceedings.'' It has taken less than 70
minutes from the breaking of the story of an intern
talking on the phone for the discussion to escalate to
talk of impeachment.
At 7:30, the show's newscaster says that ``two sources''
have told ABC's Jackie Judd that both Jordan and the
president ``instructed her to lie under oath.'' Asked later
what happened in that half hour to double her sources, Judd
says, ``I think I was trying to be extra-careful the first
time. We actually had a lot of sources.''
Visit To A Museum, Then Payback Time
For The New York Times, the intern story began the way
Watergate had: The Washington Post had caught the Paper of
Record asleep.
``Drudge was just not something on our radar screens,'' one
Times Washington reporter recalls. And while some in the
bureau had noticed Kristol's comment on This Week, they
hadn't paid much attention to it, much less allowed it to mar
the three-day Martin Luther King Day weekend.
Worse, when the Times people awoke on Wednesday and saw the
front-page Post story or caught the news on Good Morning
America, there was little they could do to get an early start
on catching up. The office had arranged a special tour of a
new exhibit of old Times front pages at Washington's Corcoran
Gallery of Art, and two reporters would later recall that
there was pressure on them to turn out in good numbers. So
until about 10:00 that morning, most of the Time's talent was
on a museum tour.
Not Jeff Gerth. He skipped the tour.
In terms of being a sleuth, Gerth is more Isikoff than
Isikoff. Now 53, he has covered everything from organized
crime, to global business regulation, to campaign finance, to
food safety in his 21 years at the Times. And in 1992, he had
broken the first Whitewater story.
Now, recalls another Times reporter, Gerth got ``hold of
his Ken Starr people and played a real guilt trip on them.
They'd just made him look bad and he was Mr. Whitewater.''
(Gerth now refuses to comment on his sources, except to say
that ``you can imply what you want, but I always have
multiple sources.'' He adds: ``I didn't feel bad about
missing this because I was never interested in touching the
sex stories.'')
Getting leaks from law enforcement officials--especially
information about prospective or actual grand jury
proceedings, where the leaks are illegal--is usually a cat-
and-mouse process. The prosecutors know they are doing
something wrong, and they worry about whom they can trust.
You run a guess by someone. They answer vaguely but
encouragingly. You push a little bit more, and they let on a
bit more. Then you try someone else, again stretching what
you think you know with a guess or two to see if that
[[Page H5257]]
person will confirm your suspicion by saying something like,
``You're not far off.'' Then you go back to the first person
for confirmation. It's almost never as easy as it seems when
a story is published or broadcast that says, ``sources say.''
But this morning, while he did not, he later asserted,
simply call one ``magic phone number'' and get it all, Gerth
had an easier, faster time of it. ``By about midday, Jeff had
a memo that was about as comprehensive as you could imagine,
which he kept supplementing,'' recalls Michael Oreskes, the
Times' Washington bureau chief. Gerth freely shared his memo
with everyone in the office.
all monica all the time
At 6:00 p.m. the MSNBC Internet news service, which
beginning at 11:00 a.m. had headlined the Lewinsky story ``A
Presidential Denial,'' is now calling it ``Crisis at the
Top,'' with the sub-headline ``Sex allegations threaten to
consume White House.'' Meantime, MSNBC's sister cable-TV
channel is talking about the intern allegations almost
nonstop. For the next 100 days, the fledgling cable channel
would become virtually all Monica, all the time.
newsweek goes on-line
The Post and ABC stories (plus a front-pager in the Los
Angeles Times that has almost as much information as the
Post) have now made a joke out of the idea that Isikoff's
story can hold until next week. So, at about 7:00 p.m.,
Newsweek goes on-line.
Isikoff's furiously typed story loads up everything he
knows. What's notable is that he now doesn't mention what he
later says was a key exchange on the tapes he heard, the
question-and-answer that had caused his editors to hold the
story: the fact that on those tapes Lewinsky answer, ``No,''
when Tripp asks, ``He [the president] knows you're going to
lie. You've told him, haven't you?''
live from havana
Each of the three broadcast network news anchors is live in
Havana for the Pope's visit, but the headline for each show
is Lewinsky--and the heart of all three reports features a
correspondent who, citing anonymous sources, has clearly been
given extensive information by Starr's office.
starr and leaks
On April 15, during a 90-minute interview with Starr, I am
reminded of the kind of old-world straight arrow that he is.
Starr is the opposite of slick--which in this case means he
doesn't lie when asked a straight, if unexpected, question.
After he expresses disappointment with my insistence that our
conversation not be off the record or on background, I ask a
series of question not about his investigation, but about
discussions he or his deputies might have had with reporters.
I make clear that these questions are based not only on the
obvious fact that many of the stories about the investigation
seem to have only been able to have come from his office, but
also on what reporters or editors at six different news
organizations have told me and, in three cases, on documents
I have seen naming his office as a source for their reporting
about the Lewinsky allegations.
Details of his answers are reported below. As a general
matter, in response to an opening ``Have you ever . . .?''
question, Starr hesitates, then acknowledges that he has
often talked to various reporters without allowing his name
to be used and that his prime deputy, Jackie Bennett, Jr.,
has been actively involved in ``briefing'' reporters,
especially after the Lewinsky story broke. ``I have talked
with reporters on background on some occasions,'' he says,
``but Jackie has been the primary person involved in that.
He has spent much of his time talking to individual
reporters.''
Starr maintains that there was ``nothing improper'' about
him and his deputies speaking with reporters ``because we
never discussed grand jury proceedings.''
If there was nothing improper, why hadn't he or Bennett
ever been quoted by name on the record?
``You'd have to ask Jackie,'' Starr replies.
Aren't these apparent leaks violations of the federal law,
commonly referred to as ``rule 6-E,'' that prohibits
prosecutors from revealing grand jury information?
``Well, it is definitely not grand jury information, if you
are talking about what witnesses tell FBI agents or us before
they testify before the grand jury or about related
matters,'' he replies. ``So, it's not 6-E.''
In fact, there are court decisions, (including one in early
May from the Washington, D.C., federal appeals court with
jurisdiction over this Starr grand jury) that have ruled
explicitly that leaking information about prospective
witnesses who might testify at a grand jury, or about
expected testimony, or about negotiations regarding immunity
for testimony, or about the strategy of a grand jury
proceeding all fall within the criminal prohibition. And
Starr himself has been quoted on at least one occasion saying
the same thing. On February 5, during one of his sidewalk
press conferences, Starr refused to comment on the Lewinsky
investigation's status. He couldn't talk, he said then on
camera, ``about the status of someone who might be a witness
[because] that goes to the heart of the grand jury process.''
Moreover, whether or not the criminal law applies to these
discussions between reporters and Starr and his deputies, it
is clearly a violation of both Justice Department
prosecutorial guidelines and the bar's ethical code for
prosecutors to leak substantive information about pending
investigation to the press.
What about that? I ask Starr. Was he conceding unethical
but not illegal leaks?
Perhaps realizing that he has already conceded too much,
Starr reverts to a rationalization so stunning that two days
later I called his just-hired spokesman, Charles Bakaly, who
sat in on much of the Starr interview, to make sure I heard
it correctly. (Bakaly said that I had.)
``That would be true,'' Starr says, ``except in the case of
a situation where what we are doing is countering
misinformation that is being spread about our investigation
in order to discredit our office and our dedicated career
prosecutors. . . . I think it is our obligation to counter
that kind of misinformation . . . and it is our obligation to
engender public confidence in the work of this office. We
have a duty to promote confidence in the work of this
office.''
In other words, Starr is claiming a free pass. For even
assuming that his leaks are not illegal under 6-E--which,
again, is a huge assumption--he's saying that they are not
unethical either, because they are aimed at negating attacks
and promoting confidence in the work of his office. Which, of
course, could be said about any leak from any prosecutor that
attempts to show that an investigation is making progress in
going after the bad guys.
Asked two days after the Starr interview about this
apparent loophole in the ethical prohibitions against leaks
(again, even assuming they are not illegal), Starr's deputy,
Bennett, says, ``It is true that Ken's view is that . . . the
public has a right to know about our work--to the extent that
it does not violate legal requirements.''
As for why, if all of this is proper, Starr or he had not
been quoted by name on the record countering all this
misinformation, Bennett says, ``I think I have been quoted on
occasion.''
NEXIS check of all stories by major newspapers, magazines,
and network news organizations concerning the first month of
the Lewinsky story did not turn up any examples of Bennett
being quoted by name talking about the progress or
particulars of the investigation.
As for the comprehensive network reports about the Lewinsky
investigation aired on the first night the story broke, Starr
confirms in our interview that Bennett had spent ``much of
the day briefing the press.'' But he asserts again that
Bennett had done nothing improper because his efforts were
directed at countering the impression that Starr's office had
improperly exceeded its jurisdiction or had mistreated
Lewinsky. In none of these reports is Bennett quoted by name.
Asked if he had spoken to the network correspondents, or to
Schmidt of the Post, or to Gerth of the Times, Bennett said,
``Ken has said what he said . . . but I am not going to
answer any questions about any particular conversations I had
with any members of the press. . . . I don't think it's any
of your business.''
The reporters involved declined all comment on their
sources--which, of course, is what they should do if they
have promised their sources anonymity.
applying the pressure
There is a purpose to these January 21 leaks beyond
glorifying Starr and embarrassing the president. On this day,
the day that the story breaks, Starr's people are again
negotiating with Lewinsky's lawyer, William Ginsburg. ``The
more they can make me feel like they have a strong case
without me,'' says Ginsburg, ``the more pressure they figure
I'll be under. And the same I guess is true for Vernon
Jordan. They want him to flip, too.''
The most laughably lapdog-like work comes from NBC's David
Bloom who, throughout this story, would perform as a virtual
stenographer for Starr. In a report lasting about two
minutes, he uses the terms ``sources say'' five times and
``law enforcement source'' twice, ending ominously with this:
``One law enforcement source put it this way, quote, ` We're
going to dangle an indictment in front of her [Lewinsky] and
see where that gets us.' '' Bloom is clearly helping Starr
fulfill his duty to ``engender confidence in the work of''
his office.
CBS's Dan Rather and the network's chief White house
correspondent, Scott Pelley, are more circumspect.
Rather characterizes Clinton's comments on National Public
Radio and The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer as ``flat-out''
denials, and he repeatedly emphasizes that none of the
allegations have been proven.
At ABC, Sam Donaldson dissects what he sees as the
tentativeness of the president's denials. Then, Jackie Judd,
citing a ``source who has heard the tapes'' that Tripp made
at the Ritz-Carlton under the Starr people's direction (which
means at this point that only Starr's office can possibly be
the source), says that Lewinsky can be heard on the tapes
saying that ``Jordan instructed her to lie under oath.'' The
Starr people are clearly using one of the three reporters
they know best and trust the most (the other two being
Isikoff and the Post's Susan Schmidt) ``to engender public
confidence'' in their work--and to step up the pressure on
Lewinsky and Jordan.
When asked specifically about these three reporters during
our interview, Starr acknowledges that his deputy, Bennett,
has talked ``extensively'' to each. He then refers me to
Bennett for details. Bennett refuses to
[[Page H5258]]
comment on any talks he had had with the favored three. In
none of their reports is Bennett ever quoted by name.
Feeding the Furnace
Twenty years ago a story of this scope would have had a
chance to catch a breath after the network evening newscasts.
The next round of coverage would not come until the morning
papers. Now it is only after the networks' evening news that
the story achieves maximum velocity. It's then that talk
television gets to use it to fill its need for the news that
is gold--the type that can generate ratings with inexpensive
talking heads rather than expensive reporters in the field.
On CNN's Larry King Live, Evan Thomas of Newsweek leads off
with his description of the Lewinsky tapes he had heard.
``Our PR department decided to do a blitz on television and
get all of us out there,'' Thomas later explains. ``It's
something the newsweeklies always want to do nowadays--get
mentioned and get noticed--and in this story we really wanted
to be identified with it because it was our story. . . . You
need to be careful about television,'' adds Thomas. ``They
try to lure you into saying more than you know, into saying
something new. It's a trap, and after a few days I hated
it.''
Thomas tells a caller who asks how he can know the tapes
are legitimate that one of the reasons that Newsweek did not
run its story that weekend was that it could not authenticate
the tapes. That's a new explanation, and, if sincere, it
raises the question of why Newsweek went on-line today with
its story; for the magazine certainly can't have
authenticated the tapes since it heard them that Saturday
morning because it did not get to keep copies.
Whatever these nits, King's show, which includes former
Clinton aides James Carville and Dee Dee Myers as well as
Ronald Reagan and George Bush press secretary Marlin
Fitzwater, does provide a good, lively introduction to the
story.
Geraldo Rivera, on CNBC's Rivera Live, provides quite a bit
more. His guests include Paula Jones spokeswoman Susan
Carpenter McMillan; William Ginsburg, who for this hour is in
his ``I-can't-say-anything'' mode; a Newsweek editor named
Jon Meacham (apparently one of Thomas's TV-blitz
squad people), who had not heard the Lewinsky tapes but is
on the show to talk about them anyway and does so happily;
and one Dolly Browning, who has written a novel (agented
by Lucianne Goldberg), which is described as a
fictionalized version of her own long affair with Bill
Clinton. Add three more lawyer-pundits and Rivera (who
also has a law degree), and you have a kind of dinner
party conversation from hell, in which any and all variety
of truth, speculation, fiction, and ax-grinding are thrown
together for the viewing public to sort out for
themselves.
Over at MSNBC, we find The Big Show with Keith Olbermann,
which features much the same mixture but with a more
sarcastic and less intelligent host. The blitzing Newsweeker
here is Howard Fineman, the magazine's chief political
correspondent. According to Thomas and Isikoff, Fineman
hadn't even known about the Lewinsky story until after Drudge
leaked it, much less heard the tapes, a point Fineman later
concedes to me.
``We have heard some of the tapes,'' Fineman begins, not
telling his viewers how royal his use of ``we'' really is.
After describing what everyone else by now has said is on
them, he adds something new, revealing that ``we'' have
``confirmed, apparently, the president's own voice on Monica
Lewinsky's answering machine. We haven't heard that tape, but
we know pretty authoritatively that apparently the
president's voice is on her tape machine. . . . If true, how
idiotic of the President of the United States,'' Fineman
declares.
Nearly for months later, as of this writing, there is no
confirmation of that tape, let alone confirmation that, if
there is one, it incriminates the president in anything.
``Television is definitely more loosey-goosey than print,''
Fineman later explains. ``And I have loosened up myself,
sometimes to my detriment . . . and said things that were
unfair or worse. . . . It's like you're doing your first
draft with no layers of editors and no rewrites and it just
goes out to millions of people.''
Within a week, Fineman would become a regular on-air
nighttime and weekend analyst for NBC, MSNBC, and CNBC for an
annual fee that he says is ``in the ballpark'' of $65,000.
That's about 40 percent of his day-job Newsweek salary for
what he estimates to be 5 to 10 percent of the time he
works for the magazine.
``We didn't let our reporters actively covering this go on
television, except for Bob [Woodward], who essentially talked
about Watergate,'' The Washington Post's Downie later says.
They're supposed to be reporters, not people giving spin or
expressing a point of view. And if I were running Time or
Newsweek I would have the same view.''
``Len and I have a different view on that,'' counters
Newsweek editor in chief Richard Smith, who also notes that
``the people on our staff who were really in the know--
Isikoff, McDaniel, Thomas--were among the most sober,
thoughtful voices you heard. But you can find people in our
organization or any organization that, given the voracious
maw that electronic journalism has become, were tempted to
say more than they knew.''
Another Olbermann guest is the NBC colleague Tim Russert,
the NBC Washington bureau chief and Meet The Press host.
``One of his best friends told me today,'' says Russert,
referring to the president, ``if this is true, he has to get
out of town.' . . Whether it will come to that, I don't
know, and I don't think it's right or fair to be in the
speculation game.''
But talk TV is the speculation game. So, after taking a
breath, Russert continues: ``But I do not underestimate
anything happening at this point. The next 48 to 72 hours are
critical.''
Olbermann's MSNBC show, which runs from 8:30 to 9:00 p.m.
eastern time, debuted last October. A marquee newscaster at
the ESPN cable sports network, Olbermann had been lured by
big bucks and the promise of aggressive promotion that would
put him and MSNBC--the Microsoft-NBC joint venture challenge
to CNN--on the map. Now, as his show wraps on this first
night of the scandal, his procedures are already talking
among themselves in the control room about using the intern
scandal to birth a whole new show called White House in
Crisis. That show would debut at 11:00 on February 3. And
MSNBC officials would later make no bones of the fact that
with that show, and with Olbermann's 8:00 p.m. show and,
indeed, with the entirety of their-talk-news daytime
programming, they were hell-bent on using the intern scandal
to do for their entire network what the Iranian hostage
crisis had done for a half-hour ABC program called Nightline
in 1979.
Indeed, MSNBC's use of the alleged intern scandal was
endemic to how all-24 hour cable news networks and all talk
radio had come to use such topics in the late 1990s. For
these talk machines, the subject matter isn't simply a
question of bumping circulation a bit for a day or a week,
the way it is for traditional newspapers or magazines or of
boosting ratings for a part of a half-hour show or an hour
magazine program the way it is for network television. Rather
it's a matter of igniting a rocket under the entire revenue
structure of the enterprise.
Thus, while the three broadcast networks' evening news
ratings increased a total of about six percent in the week
beginning on this day (January 21), MSNBC's average rating
for its entire 24-hour day--a day when almost all of its
coverage was devoted to the intern scandal--increased by 131
percent. Which meant that its revenue from advertising (which
is the only revenue that varies from week to week in cable
television) would also jump 131 percent if it could sustain
that increase.
Day 2: Thursday 1/22/98
not watergate
The Times gets up off the mat with a comprehensive page-one
report that leads with the president's denial--then details
the material on the tapes. Most of the country's other
newspapers use information from the Times and The Associated
Press, which publishes a less complete story.
What all the stories have in common is that none is based
on firsthand reporting. It is all the prosecutors' or other
lawyers' (``sources'') rendition of what witnesses or
potential witnesses have said, are saying, or might say.
``The big difference between this and Watergate,'' says Bob
Woodward is that in Watergate, Carl [Bernstein] and I went
out and talked to people whom the prosecutors were ignoring
or didn't know about. . . . In fact, that's what Watergate
was all about--the government not doing its job when it came
to prosecuting this case. . . . And we were able to look
these people in the eye and decide if they were credible and
get the nuances of what they were saying. . . . Here, the
reporting is all about lawyers telling reporters what to
believe and write.''
today fights back
After being bested by Jackie Judd and Good Morning America
yesterday, the Today show is fighting back. One advantage the
show has is NBC's contract with Newsweek's Isikoff. Plus,
they have snagged Drudge. But first we hear from Tim Russert,
who declares: ``I believe [impeachment] proceedings will
begin on the Hill if there is not clarity given by the
president over the next few weeks.''
Then cohost Matt Lauer peppers Drudge with questions about
his journalistic standards. Then he demands, ``Are you at all
concerned that you've made a mistake here?''
Drudge responds by hurling another sleaze ball: ``Not at
all. As a matter of fact, I have reported that there's a
potential DNA trail that would tie Clinton to this young
woman.''
What Drudge is referring to is his report on the Web the
day before about a semen-stained dress--which is something
Lucianne Goldberg later told me she had heard about from
Tripp and had passed on to Drudge and some other reporters.
Lauer asks for more. ``You say Monica Lewinsky has a piece
of clothing that might have the president's semen on it,'' he
says. ``What evidence do you have of that?''
``She has bragged . . . to Mrs. Tripp, who has told this to
investigators, it's my understanding,'' says Drudge.
Next up is Isikoff (who has already appeared in the first
half hour). Lauer can't let the dress story die. He demands
to know if Isikoff ``has heard anything'' about the dress, or
if he has any confirmation of its existence. Isikoff tries to
brush him off: ``I have not reported that, and I am not going
to report that until I have evidence that it is, in fact,
true.''
[[Page H5259]]
Lauer doesn't let go. ``You're not telling me whether
you've ever heard it,'' he persists. ``I've heard lots of
wild things, as I am sure you have,'' Isikoff replies,
clearly frustrated. ``But you don't go on the air and blab
them.''
Asked later why he had given Drudge the opportunity to air
any unconfirmed rumors live on national television, let alone
pressed him about the most sordid one out there, Lauer says,
``Because that story was out there. People were starting to
talk about it.'' As for why he hectored Isikoff about
Drudge's dress rumor, Lauer says, ``I was really just trying
to get him to debunk it, not substantiate it. That's all I
was doing.''
In a moment rich enough an irony for a remake of the movie
Network, Katie Couric followed Lauer's semen interviews about
an hour later with a segment featuring a child psychologist
explaining how to help our children ``make sense'' of ``the
Clinton sex scandal.''
Meanwhile, at ABC's Good Morning America, the pundits,
including George Stephanopoulos and Sam Donaldson, bat around
all manner of rumors and leaks--including a dress about which
``there are all sorts of reports on the Internet''
(Donaldson), sexually explicit tapes, and the fact that the
president admitted to having ``an affair'' with Gennifer
Flowers in his Paula Jones deposition (something also
mentioned on NBC). The only guest who stays on the straight
and narrow is legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin.
``I do have an m.o.,'' Toobin explains later. ``These cases
really come down to facts . . . and facts tend to be in short
supply at the beginning of a story like this. So I just try
to emphasize the variety of options based on the factual
scenarios. . . . It's more about journalism than the law,
because journalism [asks] about facts. . . . The problem,''
Toobin continues, ``is that if, for example, you engage in a
. . . long discussion about the legal elements of obstruction
of justice, you are a presupposing that there was an
obstruction of some kind. . . . A discussion about the
elements of impeachment presupposes that there's some
relevance to an impeachment discussion. Worst of all,'' he
concludes, ``all of the Lewinsky discussions were based on
the one hundred percent certainty that they had a sexual
relationship, and there is pressure in that direction because
it makes the discussion interesting.''
out of havana
The network evening newscasts have left Cuba and the Pope
behind; the anchors are now reporting from Washington (NBC
and CBS) or New York (ABC).
``First we heard that Brokaw was going back,'' recalls
CBS's Dan Rather. ``Then we heard Jennings was . . . clearing
out . . . I truly wanted to stay there and report on the
Pope, but I got the distinct impression [from his bosses in
New York] that if I stayed another minute, I would have been
there all alone and without a job. I might as well have just
stayed here forever with Castro.''
cbs's scoop
For all of Rather's purported reluctance, CBS News now
begins to emerge as a place for unexciting but important
scoops. Tonight, White House correspondent Scott Pelley
reports that the president's personal secretary has been
subpoenaed to testify before the grand jury and that FBI
agents had gone to her home last night. Pelley is also the
first to report that Secret Service records indicate that
Lewinsky visited the White House ``as recently as last
[December].''
`the biggest day in the clinton presidency'
On the Nightly News, NBC White House correspondent Claire
Shipman cites ``mounting circumstantial evidence--messenger
receipts [the ones created by Lucianne Goldberg's brother's
family's courier service] . . . or reports of the president's
voice on the answering machine of Lewinsky.''
NBC caps its report with a discussion between Tom Brokaw
and Tim Russert. ``Tim, tomorrow [Friday, January 23] is the
biggest day of the Clinton presidency,'' Brokaw declares.
Whereupon Russert notes that the key event of the big day--
Lewinsky's scheduled deposition in the Jones case--is now
likely to be postponed, which it was.
now, it's 24-48 hours
Russert is nothing if not consistent. Yesterday he declared
that the president had 48-72 hours to give their country a
complete explanation. Now on NBC's sister network, CNBC, he
tells Geraldo Rivera that the president ``basically has the
next 24 to 48 hours to . . . talk to the country, either
through a press conference or a news interview and explain
exactly what happened, what kind of relationship he had.''
``I was only reporting the state of mind of people at the
White House,'' Russert later contends. ``Even the president,
in those first few days, said he would provide answers sooner
rather than later.''
brendan sullivan to the rescue
Over at Larry King Live, Newsweek's Evan Thomas has
apparently forgotten his own worry about reporters trying too
hard to make news on television. ``We understand Brendan
Sullivan''--the famed Washington lawyer who represented
Oliver North, among others, and is a partner at the firm
where Clinton defense lawyer David Kendall is also a
partner--``is mastermining a legal team'' for the president,
Thomas tells King. If so, as of this writing, he has never
surfaced.
``That was just wrong,'' Thomas concedes later. ``Brendan
may have an informal role,'' he adds. ``But how are you ever
gonna prove it?''
Day 3: Friday 1/23/98
Gennifer And Monica
The Washington Post publishes a story headlined ``Flowers
Feels Vindicated By Report; Similarities Seen in
Relationships.'' The story is based on the false leak that
the president has now acknowledged an ``affair'' with
Flowers, rather than the one encounter that it turns out the
president did admit to in his deposition. (This exaggeration
of what the president actually admitted to--not of what might
have actually happened--will pollute most subsequent accounts
of the deposition.) The paper also runs an account of the
continued sparring between Starr's office and Lewinsky lawyer
William Ginsburg. It's full of anonymous sources from Starr's
side and the on-the-record Ginsburg on Lewinsky's side.
``They leak and I patch,'' Ginsburg asserts later.
`Out There'
The St. Louis Post-Dispatch (which is a good barometer of
mainstream city newspapers outside the media hothouses of
Washington, New York, and Los Angeles) leads with a story,
``From News Services,'' that--by definition in a situation
like this--vacuums up every leak and rumor about the
investigation and the Lewinsky-Starr negotiations.
Bob Woodward would later say that print had done a much
better job with this story than television because ``it has
the time to check things out and get it right.'' He's
generally right about papers with their own national
reporters, like The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times,
the Chicago Tribune, USA Today, and The New York Times. But
today, as on most days, the other papers--which now mostly
use news services and wire reporters to disseminate national
news--gobble up the confirmed and unconfirmed from everyplace
else, print and television.
It is not a pretty picture.
And it's a major manifestation of the virus that will
afflict this story: A rumor or poorly sourced and unconfirmed
leak aired or printed in one national medium ricochets around
the country until it becomes part of the national
consciousness. In short, once it's ``out there,'' it's really
out there.
The Missouri Interns
Today's Post-Distpatch rumor bazaar is supplemented by the
one kind of national story that most newspapers still produce
with their own reporters and with parody-like uniqueness: the
classic ``local angle.'' In this case, it's a piece headlined
``Missouri, Illinois Interns Are Fully Briefed on Pitfalls
of Job.'' It's about how interns at the two state
legislatures are cautioned about being wowed by ``people
of influence and charisma.''
Inside Ken Starr's Mind
On the CBS Evening News with Dan Rather, Phil Jones reports
that ``two sources familiar with the independent counsel's
investigation tell CBS News that Kenneth Starr is, quote,
`absolutely convinced that Monica Lewinsky was telling the
truth when she was recorded by her friend Linda Tripp.' ''
The Dress
ABC's Peter Jennings opens World News
Tonight with this introduction: ``Today, someone with
specific knowledge of what it is that Monica Lewinsky says
really took place between her and the president has been
talking to ABC's Jackie Judd.''
Following this buildup, Judd reports: ``The source says
Monica Lewinsky claims she would visit the White House for
sex with Mr. Clinton in the early evening or early mornings
on the weekends, when certain aides who would find her
presence disturbing were not at the office. According to the
source. Lewinsky says she saved, apparently as some kind of
souvenir, a navy blue dress with the president's semen strain
on it. If true, this could provide physical evidence of what
really happened.''
This source could be someone who has heard the tapes. It
could even be Linda Tripp. But it's not. Although Judd would
not comment on her source, Lucianne Goldberg told me that she
herself is the source for this Jackie Judd report and for
others that would follow. And she claims she heard all this
from Linda Tripp, but is not sure that any of it is on a
tape. (The Newsweek people who heard the tapes say it is not
on what they heard.) In fact, Goldberg is not sure that Tripp
said Lewinsky had talked about having saved a dress, as
opposed to a dress simply having been stained. ``I might have
added the part about it being saved,'' Goldberg told me.
We can assume that Goldberg is telling the truth that she's
the source because of what Judd reports next:
``ABC News has obtained documents that confirm that
Lewinsky made efforts to stay in contact with the president
after she left the White House. . . . These are bills, ``she
continues, holding some papers up to the camera, ``from a
courier service which Lewinsky used at least seven times
between October 7 and December 8.''
Yes, the courier service--the one owned by Goldberg's
brother's family. How else but from Goldberg could Judd have
obtained those handy records?
Stop Us Before We Kill Again
Every two or three days throughout the reporting of this
alleged scandal, the press seems to stop, take a breath, and
flagellate itself, as if to say to its audience, ``Stop us
[[Page H5260]]
before we kill again.'' Much of it, including a piece by
ABC's Cynthia McFadden and a special on CNN moderated by
Jeff Greenfield, would be quite good. Much of it would be
quite the opposite.
For example, minutes after Judd's scoop, Jennings
introduces Tom Rosensteil of the Pew Charitable Trusts'
Project for Excellence in Journalism.
Jennings: ``How do you think the media is doing, Tom?''
Rosensteil: ``So much of what we have seen in the last
three days is speculation, rumor, innuendo.''
Jennings: ``Let me say . . . that I think the press has
been pretty good on saying repeatedly these are allegations.
Would you have us ignore them?''
Rosensteil: ``No. . . . But we have reporters go on and
characterize secondhand what is on the tapes. . . . We've had
reporters go on and say that the president has 48 hours to .
. . put the scandal behind him.''
Jennings: ``Okay, Tom Rosensteil, thanks very much.
Critical of the press. Part of his job.''
a weakness for 24-year-olds
Oldberman's Big Show at 8:00 features a guest who says.
``Maybe if he stood . . . up there and said, `I'm sorry. I
have a weakness for 24-year-olds,' he might . . . survive
it.''
The expert: Watergate ex-con John Ehrlichman.
four other interns
Geraldo Rivera hosts the usual melange, who trade all
variety of wild theories. He calls them his ``cast,'' and
they include Gennifer Flowers, Paula Jones's lawyer, and some
other lawyers, one of whom is Ann Coulter, a Rivera regular
described as a conservative ``constitutional law attorney.''
Asked by Rivera if she thinks it is ``sleazy'' that Lewinsky
had been questioned for ``eight to nine hours without an
attorney present,'' Coulter counters matter-of-factly that it
is not as bad as ``the President of the United States using
her to service him, along with four other interns.''
What's curious about the Rivera show is the way it uses its
NBC bloodline to combine this kind of rollicking garbage with
the more serious contributions of the network's newspeople.
Mixed in with the screaming and smearing from Coulter and the
others are live reports from White House correspondent
Shipman and even taped bites from Tom Brokaw.
It's a fascinating display of corporate synergy. Or perhaps
it is a suicidal, long-term cheapening of a great brand name.
True, the high-low mix helps ratings short-term; but if your
business plan as a media organization is to be a cut above
Drudge--and it has to be, because anyone can be Drudge--how
can this be a good long-term business strategy?
Asked later if she minded being sandwiched in that night
between Rivera, talking about the president's ``alleged
peccadilloes,'' and Coulter, talking about those ``four other
interns,'' Shipman says, ``It's true that you get a different
style on NBC with Brokaw than with Olbermann or Geraldo, but
I think Geraldo does a pretty good job of separating out the
rumor from the fact. He's very smart and I am not at all
uncomfortable with his role at NBC.''
Do the NBC and Brokaw brand names get hurt by mixing them
with Geraldo? ``Geraldo does what he does,'' Brokaw says.
``He doesn't arrive in the guise of someone who is going to
be a traditional mainstream reporter. . . . And the public
is very good at telling the difference. They have a good
filter on this stuff.''
``In the case of Claire or Tom, they're being reporters on
Nightly News and being reporters on Geraldo,'' says NBC News
president Andrew Lack later. ``The shows have different
flavors, but as long as they don't change their acts, I'm not
concerned.''
Day 4: Saturday 1/24/98
the souvenir dress
The Lucianne Goldberg-Jackie Judd semen dress story is
spreading. The front page of the New York Post blares,
``Monica's Love Dress,'' with the declarative subhead
``Exintern Kept Gown as Souvenir of Affair.'' The story
quotes ``sources.''
``She Kept Dress,'' echoes the Daily News.
Some papers across the country also ran a United Press
International wire service story, sent out the night before,
saying that ABC has quoted an unnamed source saying,
``Lewinsky saved a navy blue dress stained with President
Clinton's semen.'' So now we have a source not saying that
that is what Lewinsky says, but just plain stating it.
lewinsky not `squeezed'
Schmidt of The Washington Post does stenography for the
prosecutors. Citing ``sources close to Starr,'' she writes
that Lewinsky's ten-hour session in Arlington with Starr's
deputies and the FBI wasn't really a harrowing encounter,
after all. It only took that long, Schmidt writes, because
Lewinsky let it drag on.
This kind of leak from Starr's shop clearly falls under the
category of what Starr later contends were ``attempts by us
to counter the spread of misinformation.''
In fact, in our interview he even cites ``correcting
allegations about our mode of interrogating a particular
witness'' as an example of the kind of press briefing Bennett
had undertaken. But as an attempt to affect public
perception--and a potential jury's perception--it is also a
clear violation of Justice Department guidelines and the
lawyer's code of professional responsibility.
Resignation
At 6:00 p.m. on this Saturday evening, CNN breaks into its
regular programming with a bulletin. Wolf Blitzer, standing
on the White House lawn, says, ``Despite the president's
public and carefully phrased public denials, several of his
closest friends, and advisers, both in and out of the
government, now tell CNN that they believe he almost
certainly did have a sexual relation[ship] with . . .
Lewinsky, and they're talking among themselves about the
possibility of a resignation . . .'' Mark this moment--about
6:00 p.m. on Saturday, January 24--as the height of the
frenzy.
``Every one of us senior advisers were sitting there . . .
in the White House having a meeting to prepare to go on the
Sunday talk shows,'' Clinton aide Paul Begala later recalls,
``and we heard Wolf outside saying we were talking about
resignation . . . It was pure bullshit. And we all went out
there and yelled at him.''
But Blitzer had been careful to say he was referring to
Clinton friends, in and out of the government, not just to
the White House group Begala is talking about. And with all
the media tornadoes swirling about concerning other women, a
smoking gun--semen dress, and the like, it should have been
no surprise that some of the president's friends, especially
those outside the immediate White House group working on
fighting the storm, would at least ``talk about''
resignation.
The `Come-Hither Look'
Just after the Biltzer resignation-talk story, CNN produces
a 10- or 12-second video clip from its archives that shows
the president embracing Lewinsky. She is in a crowd at a
White House lawn reception. It's the first picture of the two
of them together, and it will be aired hundreds of times in
the weeks to follow, usually in slow motion.
``I thought that showing it once was okay, but that after
that we should have shown it in context,'' CNN/US president
Richard Kaplan says later. ``Clinton always embraces people
and he must have embraced a hundred people just that way at
that event . . . I told our people to show it in context.''
So how come we still have only seen this isolated embrace?
I ask Kaplan two months after it was first aired, ``I don't
know,'' he says. ``I told them not do it. I just don't
know.''
Tomorrow, in its new issues, Newsweek will make even more
of the picture. Evan Thomas will pen an article that tells
readers to ``look closely at those video clips. There is a
flirty girl in a beret, gazing a little too adoringly at the
president--who in turn gives her a hug that is just a bit too
familiar.''
``What Newsweek wrote was just bullshit,'' Kaplan asserts.
``There's nothing special about the embrace.''
``Any criticism of that is completely full of shit,''
counters Thomas. ``All over Washington you could just feel
people reacting to that picture. She had that come-hither
look.''
Ratings Heaven
According to MSNBC communications director Maria Battaglia,
the fledgling cable network scores its highest ever full-day
rating (outside of its Princess Diana coverage) today. By her
estimate, ``ninety-five percent of our coverage was the
scandal.'' The stars are Newsweek pundits Isikoff and
Jonathan Alter, who has a contract with NBC and its cable
networks to produce pieces and provide commentary.
Day 5: Sunday 1/25/98
`special assistant to the president for b--- j---'???
At 6:00 a.m., Time magazine director of public affairs
Diana Pearson reports for work. Pearson, who had recently
been lured away from Newsweek, is one of a new breed of in-
house magazine marketing people. Her job: to get Time
mentioned. Her main tool: the press release she finishes at
dawn every Sunday morning that touts the issue that went to
press late the night before. She then faxes it to newspapers
and television networks, making sure that it reaches the TV
people in time to be talked about on the Sunday shows.
This morning she is working with what Time managing editor
Walter Isaacson later tells me ``is our crash effort to catch
up to Newsweek.''
She reads through Time's piece and decides, as she later
puts it, that ``the most catchy item, and one thing we had
that seemed to be new,'' is an unsourced claim buried in
Time's exhaustive report, in which Lewinsky reportedly told
Tripp that if she ever moved back to the White House from the
Pentagon, she would be ``Special Assistant to the President
for blow jobs.'' So, she makes it the headline of her press
release.
``I have never seen this,'' Isaacson says when asked about
this press release five weeks later. ``But I have heard about
it, and can tell you that that should not have been the
headline. . . . We've now taken careful steps,'' he adds,
``to make sure that all press releases are cleared by a top
editorial person.''
Five weeks after she penned the release, Pearson says that
``in retrospect it probably wasn't representative of the
story.'' She also says that ``there has been no change in the
press release procedure. No one sees them after I do them
Sunday morning.''
Exhaustive, But . . .
Time's package of stories is, indeed, not well represented
by that tawdry press release. Fabulously written,
particularly the
[[Page H5261]]
main story by senior editor Nancy Gibbs, it raises questions
from all sides and touches all bases--from Ken Starr's
tactics, to Vernon Jordan's role, to Lewinsky's bio, to Linda
Tripp's motives, to the relevant legal issues. It is all done
in a better, more understandable form than any other
publication, including, ironically, Newsweek, which still has
so much to report from the tapes that its package seems
overwhelmed and disorganized.
``You can cover a lot of sins and reporting gaps with Nancy
Gibbs,'' Time Inc. editor in chief Norman Pearlstine explains
later.
``A role of a newsweekly,'' continues Pearlstine, in what
many of his more aggressive reporters would view as an
obvious rationalization, ``usually can't be to make news the
way Newsweek did. . . . The more traditional role is that of
synthesis, analysis, and writing. And for that I'll take a
Nancy Gibbs over any investigative reporter in America. . . .
Remember,'' he adds, ``that in the beginning [Time founder]
Henry Luce didn't even think we needed reporters, just
writers who could synthesize what others were reporting . . .
which for this story in particular is what I think readers
really needed.''
True enough. But one could argue that, instead of a filter,
Time applied a shovel to reporting what was ``out there''
already.
About five weeks after the issue appeared, I asked
Pearlstine to read the following lines of Gibbs's story:
``Monica Lewinsky's story was so tawdry, and so
devastating, it was hard to know which was harder to believe:
that she would make up such a story, or that it actually
might have happened. Without proof, both possibilities were
left to squirm side by side. . . . As each new tape surfaced,
each new detail arose, of Secret Service logs showing late-
night visits when Hillary was out of town; of presents sent
by courier; of a dark dress saved as a souvenir, spattered
with the president's DNA, the American public began stripping
Bill Clinton of the benefit of the doubt.''
Didn't that last sentence, for all its opening qualifiers,
simply throw in a whole bunch of unproved allegations
unfairly? I asked Pearlstine. ``Yes, I do have a problem with
it. It seems to have just taken everything out there and
treated it as fact,'' he said, through he added that he
wanted to confer with those who had worked on the story and
get back to me.
Three days later, Pearlstine sent a letter attaching a
longer letter from Time managing editor Walter Isaacson
defending the paragraphs. Pearlstine said the Isaacson letter
made him more comfortable than he had been when we spoke.
Isaacson's letter, citing the qualifiers that preceded that
final sentence, argued that ``even in hindsight, I do not
think we could have stated more clearly that these
allegations which were . . . widely reported but also
confirmed to us by investigators . . . were not proven and
were part of a murky tale.''
Of course what was ``confirmed by us'' were only the
unsourced allegations by investigators. But Isaacson is
right: The real problem is the swirling allegations and
rumors, not Time's performance in summarizing them. And
Isaacson's qualifiers in talking about them were a lot
stronger than most.
softening starr's image
Susan Schmidt of The Washington Post begins this Sunday
with another softening of Ken Starr's image. ``[A] source
close to the prosecutor insisted he never intended to
eavesdrop on Jordan or Clinton,'' Schmidt reports.
anguished linda
On the Sunday Today show, Isikoff--now openly engaged in
punditry and touting how ``genuine'' the taped conversations
seem with a certainty that he would never be allowed to
assert in print--refers to an anguished Monica Lewinsky being
heard on Newsweek's newly released tape excerpts, along with
``a similarly anguished Linda Tripp.''
`it's 50-50 at best'
Next up on the Sunday Today show is Tim Russert, who takes
time out from preparing for Meet The Press to tell host Jack
Ford that ``one [friend] described [President Clinton] as
near Houdini-like in his ability to escape these kind of
scandals and crises. But they realize that it's 50-50 at
best.''
meet the drudge
On his own show, Russert announces that among his Meet The
Press guests is Matt Drudge.
Drudge seizes his moment. When Russert asks about reports
on the tapes of the president and other women, Drudge
declares, ``There is talk all over this town [that] another
White House staffer is going to come out from behind the
curtains this week. . . . [T]here are hundreds--hundreds,
according to Miss Lewinsky, quoting Clinton.'' At a later
point, Drudge adds that if the Clinton side keeps denying the
charges, ``this upcoming week is going to be one of the worst
weeks in the history of this country.''
``Our Round Table is an op-ed page,'' Russert explains
later. ``And Matt Drudge was a big player--the big player--in
breaking this story. . . . We can pretend that the seven to
ten million Americans who were logging on to him don't have
the right to see him, but I don't agree.''
the witness
On ABC's This Week with Sam Donaldson--Cokie Roberts (where
the alleged scandal got its first airing a week ago), ABC's
Jackie Judd has what Cokie Roberts announces are ``new
revelations in the alleged affair.''
Judd then declares: ``ABC News has learned that Ken Starr's
investigation has moved well beyond Monica Lewinsky's claims
and taped conversations that she had an affair with President
Clinton. Several sources have told us that in the spring of
1996, the president and Lewinsky were caught in an intimate
encounter in a private area of the White House. It is not
clear whether the witnesses were Secret Service agents or
White House staff.''
There are four things you need to know about that
paragraph:
1. This report surfaces at the time that Starr's people are
putting the most pressure on Ginsburg and his client to have
Lewinsky testify that she had an affair with the president
and that he pressured her to lie about it. ``With leaks like
that, they were just trying to scare me into thinking they
had a smoking gun and didn't need Monica,'' Ginsburg asserts
later. As if to make sure that the point isn't lost on
Ginsburg, Judd's report concludes this way: ``This
development . . . underscores how Ken Starr is collecting
evidence and witnesses to build a case against the
president--a case that would not hinge entirely on the word
of Monica Lewinsky.''
2. On the night before (Saturday, January 24) ABC had
televised a one-hour special on the alleged scandal, and
according to anchor Peter Jennings, Judd had wanted to air
her report then. But, says Jennings ``I wanted to hold it . .
. I was just not comfortable with the sourcing.''
Asked later what happened between late Saturday night and
early Sunday morning to make the story airworthy, Jennings
says, ``I wasn't there on Sunday, but I am told that Jackie
worked on it more and was happy with the sourcing by Sunday.
. . . She is a fabulous reporter, and I have no reason to
doubt her. . . . She plays by the rules and her sourcing is
always great,''
Judd later explains that ``there was no start or stopping
in this news cylce. So, yes, between Saturday night and
Sunday there was new sources.''
3. What can ``several'' sources mean? Webster's dictionary
defines several as ``more than two but fewer than many.''
Didn't Judd even know how many sources she had? Can there be
any excuse for this imprecision other than that this was a
figure of speech? ``To me,'' Judd later explains, ``it
usually means a minimum of three. . . . I know it was at
least three. Of course, I knew how many it was at the time,
but I didn't think I needed to specify.
4. As of this writing, nearly four months after Judd's ABC
``scoop,'' there is no sign of these independent witnesses.
Does ABC still think the story was right? I later ask
Jennings. ``We have not yet retracted it,'' he says, ``and I
am still happy she's had no reason to think we should retract
it. . . . Overall, ABC has done a fabulous job. Our reporting
on this has been exemplary, and I challenge anyone to find
where it hasn't been.''
``We have not had to retract a single thing,'' echoces
Judd. ``I still think there might be a potential witness,''
she adds.
Might be? A potential witness?
``Jackie Judd is a first-class reporter; she's no
crackpot,'' says Richard Kaplan, who is president of CNN but
until last year was a top news executive at ABC and used to
supervise Judd. It's an assessment echoed by Judd's current
colleagues, too. But a first-class reporter needs an editor--
a questioner, someone who slows up on the accelerator at
exactly the time that the reporter becomes certain that full
speed ahead is the only speed.
This is especially true if the reporter is aggressive and
has been covering a prosecutorial beat too long. For example,
reporters who make their careers organized crime can become
so inured to the badness of their targets and to the
righteousness of the prosecutors on the other side that,
after a while some believe almost anything the prosecutors
tell them. There is an almost complete suspension of the
skepticism that had made them want to be reporters in the
first place.
That's what has happened to Jackie Judd this morning. And
apparently there was no editor there to stop her. It was as
if in the fabled scenes in the Watergate movie, All The
President's Man. when Jason Robards, playing Washington Post
executive editor Ben Bradlee, tells his ``boys,'' Woodward
and Bernstein, that they ``need more,'' they shrug the old
man off and take their stuff to the writing press.
And as with those organized crime reporters, it may be that
Judd--and Schmidt and Isikoff, too--are right in general
about President Clinton's allegiance to his marriage vows.
Ditto Ken Starr. The issue here, though, is whether they're
right about this particular allegation and are treating the
president fairly in considering it. In short, whether there
turns out to be a witness or now, how can Judd defend a
January story declaring that there were witnesses by saying
four months later that ``there still might be a potential
witness''?
the witness as predicated
Now that Judd's scoop has been aired, Sam Donaldson uses it
as the predicate for much of his questioning of guests on
This Week. They include Clinton aide Paul Begala, who attacks
it as an unsubstantiated leak, and House Judiciary Committee
Chairman Henry Hyde, who would preside over any initial
impeachment hearings.
[[Page H5262]]
Donaldson begins with Hyde by saying, ``Corroborating
witnesses have been discovered . . . Mr. Chairman, what do
you think of that?''
Hyde doesn't bite. ``It's an allegation,'' he says. ``We
don't have any proof of it yet.''
In their closing roundtable discussion, Donaldson tells co-
anchor Cokie Roberts, ``If he's not telling the truth, I
think his presidency is numbered in days. . . . Mr. Clinton,
if he's not telling the truth and the evidence shows that,
will resign, perhaps this week.''
``You have Sam Donaldson saying it's a matter of days, and
Tim Russert talking about 72 hours--it's kinda crazy,'' Bob
Woodward says later. ``They seem to forget that it was April
of 1974 when the tapes came out with Nixon saying, `I want
you to lie and it still took four months.''
Three months later, Donaldson defends his prediction,
saying. ``I said, . . . ``if there is evidence,' and I
thought evidence would be presented before now. And I clearly
meant evidence that it is persuasive.''
ratcheting up the story
At the end of his show, Donaldson takes Judd's report a
step further. Instead of Judd's ``several sources have told
us'' introduction, Donaldson closes the show by declaring
that ``corroborating witnesses have been found who caught the
president and Miss Lewinsky in an intimate act in the White
House.''
``Someone in the control room asked me so summarize
Jackie's report,'' Donaldson explains later. ``And one of the
dangers of an ad-lib situation is that you never say it as
precisely as you would like.'' As for the bona fides of the
story three months later, Donaldson says, ``All I can say is
that we believed it was accurate, but people changed their
minds about what they would say.''
four sources
By about 3:00 Sunday afternoon, The New York Times is
drafting its own story about witnesses interrupting the
president and Lewinisky. ``When I saw the Judd report on ABC,
I recognized it as a story we were working on,'' Times
Washington bureau chief Michael Oreskes later recalls. ``By
the time I came in that afternoon, we had four sources. And
we were preparing to lead the Times with it the next
morning.''
bulletin
At 4:42 eastern time, Tom Brokaw and Claire Shipman of NBC
break into pre-Super Bowl programming with the following
bulletin:
Brokaw: ``There's an unconfirmed report that, at some
point, someone caught the president and Ms. Lewinsky in an
intimate moment. what do you know about that?''
Shipman: ``Well, sources in Ken Starr's office tell us that
they are investigating that possibility but that they haven't
confirmed it.''
``Our anchor and White House reporter come on the air and
say, here's something that we don't know it true but we just
thought we'd tell you anyway just for the hell of it, so we
can say we reported it just in case it turns out to be
true,'' a disgusted NBC reporter says later. ``That's
outrageous.''
Asked three months later why he aired that kind of
``bulletin,'' Brokaw says, ``That's a good question. I guess
it was because of ABC's report. Our only rationale could be
that it's out there, so let's talk about it . . . But in
retrospect we shouldn't have done it.''
Of course, what Shipman did confirm in that report was the
commission of one certain felony, though not one involving
the president: The leak of material from Starr's office
pertaining to a grand jury investigation. For she does tell
us that her report comes form ``sources in Ken Starr's
office.''
In our later interview, when asked about Shipman's report,
Starr refers me to Bennett, who, again, refused to discuss
any conversations with specific reporters.
story killed
At about 6:00, the Times kills its witness story. According
to Oreskes, reporters Stephen Labaton and John Broder ``came
in to me and said `guess what? We don't have it.' It turns
out that they had felt uneasy, and when they tracked back our
four sources [Broder and Labaton], concluded that they were
only telling them what they'd all heard from the same
person--who did not know it firsthand anyway.
``Sometimes, especially in this thing, the story you're
proudest of is the story you don't run.'' Oreskes adds. ``We
were under enormous pressure on this one . . . People were
beating us. But sometimes you just have to sit there and take
it.''
pulling back
By the time ABC airs its evening news at 6:30, Jackie Judd
is pulling back. In the morning. ``several sources'' had told
her the president and Lewinsky was caught in the act. Now we
hear from her only that ``Starr is investigating claims''
that a witness caught them in the act.
Day 6: Monday 1/26/98
Caught in the Act
Picking up on Judd's ``scoop,'' both the Daily News and
post in New York scream. ``Caught In The Act'' across their
front pages this morning. Meanwhile, the St. Louis Post-
Dispatch, in a story bylined ``From News Services,'' reports
(as do other newspapers using similar wire services) that
``ABC News reported that the president and Lewinsky were
caught in an intimate encounter.
`All This Stuff Floating Around'
One of the stranger pick-ups of Judd's witness story comes
from the Chicago Tribune, a paper ``shut out of getting our
own scoops from Starr because we never invested in having our
people cover him on Whitewater,'' according to Washington
bureau Chief James Warren.
The Tribune reports what ABC reported, then says that it
could not confirm the story independently: ``I was against
using it, but agreed to this as a compromise,'' Warren
explains later.
Tribune associate managing editor for foreign and national
news George de Lama says later, ``We figured that our readers
had seen it and had access to it. So we had to acknowledge
that it existed, and we wanted to say we could not confirm
it.''
It is indeed a dilemma. Should a story become a news item
that has to be repeated and talked about simply because it is
broadcast the first time? Or should Chicago newspaper readers
be shielded from it?
``In retrospect,'' de Lama later concedes, ``I wish we had
not published it.... It soon became clear to us that there's
gonna be all kinds of stuff out there floating around and we
should just publish what we know independently.''
Which the Tribune later did, admirably, with a scoop
interview of press secretary Mike McCurry musing about the
possibility that the truth of the president's relationship
with Lewinsky is ``complicated,'' and with a story about
money going to a legal defense fund for Paula Jones being
used by Jones personally.
`Desperate Times'
Again, Newsweek's Evan Thomas has forgotten his own
admonition about reporters mouthing off on television. On
Good Morning America to promote Newsweek's new issue, he is
asked, ``Do the [president's] advisers think that the
American people are going to draw some sort of distinction
between sexual acts?'' To which Thomas replies, as if he
knows, ``Desperate times call for desperate measures.''
More Pressure on Lewinsky
On the NBC Nightly News, David Bloom, with his ever-helpful
``sources,'' puts more pressure on Lewinsky and Ginsburg.
``[S]ources also caution that if no deal is struck tonight,
[Lewinsky] could be hauled before a . . . grand jury. . . as
early as tomorrow.'' Four months later, there would still be
no deal and no Lewinsky testimony.
Monica At The Gates
On CBS's evening newscast, Scott Pelley reports that
``sources'' tell him that on January 3, Lewinsky was ``denied
entry at the [White House] gate'' and ``threw a fit,
screaming, Don't you know who I am?' '' It's a report that
doesn't get picked up by the rest of the media, despite its
apparent news value; if true, it would mean that during this
exact week that the president was trying to get Lewinsky to
participate in a cover-up, she was being turned away at the
White House. But three months later Pelley maintains, ``I
know this story was true.''
`This Just In': A Seventh-Hand Story
Larry King Live seems to be going well for the president.
This is the night of the day when the president forcefully
denied having had sex with ``that woman, Miss Lewinsky.''
Former campaign aide Mandy Grunwald and the Reverend Jesse
Jackson (plus the ubiquitous Evan Thomas, Republican politico
Ed Rollins, and former Washington Post executive editor Ben
Bradlee) are engaged in a balanced, calm discussion for most
of the show. Then, with a few minutes left. King returns
from a commercial break with a bulletin:
``Panel, this just in from Associated Press, Washington: A
Secret Service agent is reportedly ready to testify that he
saw President Clinton and former White House intern Monica
Lewinsky in a compromising position. The Dallas Morning News
reports tonight [on its website] that it has talked to an
unidentified lawyer familiar with the negotiations between
the agency and the office of . . . Ken Starr. The paper
quotes the lawyer as saying the agent is, quote, ``now a
government witness,'' end quote.''
Reread that paragraph. At best, it's a fourth-hand report
(though, as we'll see, it's actually seventh-hand). The
Associated Press (1) is quoting The Dallas Morning News (2)
as quoting an anonymous lawyer-source (3) as saying that a
witness (4) will say something. Yet it punctures the ``maybe-
Clinton-will-survive'' tone of the rest of the King show--as
it does the remainder of Geraldo Rivera's show on CNBC, where
he introduces the AP report as follows: ``Uh-oh, hold it. Oh,
hold it. Hold it, hold it, hold it. Bulletin, Bulletin,
Bulletin. Associated Press, three minutes ago. . . .''
Ninety minutes later, The Dallas Morning News pulls the
story, because, the News would later explain, its source
called in to say they had gotten it wrong.
``You get handed something you read it,'' Larry King says
later. ``I didn't have to, but I kind of felt compelled to. .
. . It wasn't the New York Post. It was the AP and The Dallas
Morning News. It's a dilemma of live television. What do you
do? You're at the mercy of what's handed to you.''
CNN president Richard Kaplan says later that he had been
asked earlier in the evening by CNN producers who had heard
about the possible Dallas story whether they should use it if
the Morning News indeed published it. He had said no. ``But
then Tom Johnson''--CNN's chairman and Kaplan's boss--
[[Page H5263]]
``called into the control room,'' Kaplan says. ``Tom knew
these Dallas people well and he said they were reliable.''
Johnson says that his go-ahead for CNN to report the Dallas
Morning News story came only ``after some producer just
ripped it off the wire and had Larry read it; I then told
them it was okay to do it on the ten o'clock news how, too.''
Still, Johnson confirms that ``it's my fault. I called around
to the Morning News people and to AP people, and they assured
me on this story. . . . The Morning News people told me the
source, who was some lawyer. . . . But I'm the one who made
the decision.''
Assoicated Press Washington bureau chief Jonathan Wollman
explains later that AP uses its own judgment in deciding
which stories from other news organizations to publish on its
wire. He also notes that, soon after his organization filed
the report that Larry King read, ``we added something from
our own people quoting Secret Service agents as being
skeptical of the Morning News story. Then we added something
form the White House disputing the story.''
In fact, this story was a leak from a Washington lawyer
named Joseph diGenova. He and his wife, Victoria Toensig, are
former federal prosecutors who often appear on talk TV,
defending Starr and making the case for the president's
guilt.
According to Toensig, she had been approached by a ``friend
of someone who is a former worker in the White House.''
(Toensig will not say if the person's friend was a Secret
Service agent or a White House steward.) The person who
contacted Toensig told Toensig that this former White House
employee had been told by a coworker at the White House
that the coworker had, says Toensig, ``seen the president
and Lewinsky in a compromising position.'' Toensig was
asked by the friend whether she might be willing to
represent this secondhand witness if this person decided
to go to Starr and talk about what the alleged firsthand
witness (the coworker) had said.
DiGenova had overheard his wife discussing this possibility
with this friend of the secondhand witness. Then, according
to diGenova, after he had heard Jackie Judd's report of a
witness on Sunday, he ``mentioned'' to Dallas Morning News
reporter David Jackson that he'd ``heard the same story that
Judd had broadcast.'' Without telling Jackson, diGenova was
thinking about what he had heard his wife discussing.
However, by the time diGenova had mentioned this to Jackson,
unbeknownst to him, the person who had approached his wife on
behalf of this secondhand witness had broken off the
discussions, and the secondhand had not come forward.
According to Toensig, when Jackson called her on Monday and
asked her about the story. ``I told him, `If Joe [her
husband] told you that, he's wrong. Do not go with that
story.' But I guess he didn't believe me.''
According to Toensig, before her talks with the friend of
the possible secondhand witness had broken off, she had
mentioned the possibility of the witness to people in Starr's
office--which means that when Jackson of the Morning News
called Starr's office to get a second-source
``confirmation,'' his second source was, in fact, no second
source at all. It was just someone playing back diGenova's
now-inoperative story, which diGenova's wife had tried to
shoot down.
``When I saw Geraldo read the bulletin,'' Toensig recalls,
``I figured they must have gotten it from someone else--not
Joe and certainly not me. Then I got a call from [the Morning
News] later that night and Jackson asked me to tell him again
that he was right . . . and I immediately said, `I told you
you were wrong earlier to not go with it.' ''
``This was a single-source story from me,'' diGenova
concludes. ``I thought they'd check it; all I did was give
them a vague tip of what I had heard Vicki talking about on
the phone.'' Jackson of The Dallas Morning News declines to
comment on his conversations with diGenova or his sources for
the story.
In short, this story of a ``Secret Service'' witness seems
to have been a one-source story from a fifth-hand source:
DiGenova (1) heard his wife (2) talking to a friend (3) of
someone (4) who had talked to someone (5) who said he'd seen
Lewinsky with Clinton. That makes CNN's report a seventh-hand
story, because we have to add The Dallas Morning News and The
Associated Press to the chain before we get to Larry King.
``As a result of the Morning News thing,'' CNN's president
of global gathering and international networks, Eason Jordan,
says later, ``We instituted a new policy. At least two senior
executives here have to give the okay before we go with
anyone else's reporting on anything having to do with this
story. . . . We've decided that it's a total cop-out to go
with someone else's stuff and just attribute it to them. Once
you put in on your air it's your responsibility.''
``I can't tell you how much pressure we were under from our
own bosses to report something like the Morning News
reported,'' CBS's Dan Rather remembers. ``that rumor was all
over the place. But we just couldn't nail it. . . . It was a
third-hand source and maybe a fourth-hand source.''
``Without getting into details,'' adds Scott Pelley of CBS,
``I can tell you that we just didn't like the sourcing. It
was too suspect.''
According to a journalist at ABC, and to two reporters
working on the story that day at rival news organizations,
Jackie Judd's sources for her report about a White House
witness the night before were also people in Starr's office
who had heard about the supposed secondhand witness, probably
from Toensig. Which would make hers a fifth-hand report, too.
Jennings disputes this. ``I have no doubt that we were on
to a different story,'' he says, ``because I know who our
sources are.'' Could his sources, whom he declined to name,
have been people who had simply talked to the Dallas paper's
sources? ``I'm fully satisfied that they weren't,'' he says.
Judd refuses all comment about ``anything having to do with
sources.''
A Good Day On The Web
At MSNBC's ambitious website there have been 830,000 visits
today, far more than for any other day, including the days
following the death of Princess Diana.
Day 7: Tuesday 1/27/98
The Retracted Story Lives
The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reports this morning that ``The
Dallas Morning News reported Monday night that a Secret
Service agent was prepared to testify that he saw Clinton and
Lewinsky in a compromising situation.''
Goodbye
Tonight is the night of the president's State of the Union
message, and in The Washington Post, James Glassman writes a
column saying that the president should say he's sorry and
that he's resigning.
`Reckless Idiot'
New York Times op-ed foreign affairs columnist Thomas
Friedman writes about his feeling of personal betrayal: ``I
knew he was a charming rogue with an appealing agenda, but I
didn't think he was a reckless idiot with an appealing
agenda.''
four options
On the Microsoft-owned and Michael Kinsley-edited Slate web
magazine, Jacob Weisberg presents four options for the
president with their chances of success: Brazen It Out: 20
percent; Contrition: 5 percent; Full Confession: 15 percent;
and Wag the Dog: 2 percent.
circulation up
The Washington Post reports that USA Today printed 20
percent more copies than usual for its weekend edition, that
CNN's rating are up about 40 percent, and that Time added
100,000 copies to its usual newsstand distribution.
``let's not ask about any rumors''
The event of the day is Hillary Clinton's morning
appearance on the Today show, forcefully defending her
husband. Matt Lauer interviews her, and does a terrific job.
``We found out over the weekend that she was going to go
through with [the long-scheduled interview],'' Lauer says.
``On Monday afternoon I sat down with [various producers and
NBC News president] Andy Lack to run through it for about two
or three hours. . . . It wasn't so much about questions as
about tone. . . . We talked about asking her about whether
the president defines oral sex as sexual relations, but we
decided that we were not going to ask the First Lady of the
United States a question like that.
``Another thing we decided,'' Lauer says, ``was that we
were not going to ask a single question based on rumor or
speculation.''
Why was that standard used for Mrs. Clinton, but for no one
else?
``Because we knew we'd run into a dead end because she'd
say, `that's based on rumor or a sealed document,' or
something like that, `and I'm not going to talk about it.' ''
If only other Today guests had that discipline.
Day 8: Wednesday 1/28/98
do as we say, not as we do
The St. Louis Post-Dispatch greets its readers with an
editorial that slams Jackie Judd's ABC report about
a ``witness'' and the Dallas Morning News report about a
``Secret Service witness'' as examples of ``rumor being
reported as news. . . . The media would be best to stick
with traditional conventions that require firsthand
information and confirmation from multiple sources,'' says
the paper.
Not mentioned is the fact that the Post-Dispatch had itself
reported both stories in its own news columns. Why not?
William Freivogel, who wrote the editorial for the Post-
Dispatch, explains. ``We don't in general criticize our own
paper. . . . This was meant as a general commentary.''
Day 9: Thursday 1/29/98
The Vanishing Dress
The CBS Evening News leads with a scoop. Scott Pelley
reports that ``no DNA evidence or stains have been found on a
dress that belongs to Lewinsky.''
``I'd much rather have our scoop about the semen dress than
the scoop everyone else had,'' Pelley says later.
The next night, Jackie Judd will spin the no-dress story
her way. She'll say ``law enforcement sources . . . say a
dress and other pieces of clothing were tested, but that they
had all been dry-cleaned before the FBI picked them up from
Lewinsky's apartment.'' In other words, the lack of evidence
only proves how clever the criminals are.
Whether it turns out that Bill Clinton had sex with Monica
Lewinsky or not (and whether it turns out that he stained one
dress or 100 dresses) has nothing to do with the fact that
Judd's every utterance is infected with the clear assumption
that the president is guilty at a time when no reporter can
know that.
[[Page H5264]]
Day 10: Friday 1/30/98
Those Terrible Paparazzi
The Daily News leads with a story about Lewinsky being
mobbed by the press when she went out to dinner in Washington
the night before with Ginsburg. ``The black car being pursued
by the paparazzi echoed the scene just before the car crash
that killed Princess Diana,'' the paper reports.
On the front page of the paper is the paparazzi shot
of Lewinsky in the car.
Asked later why his own paper would help enhance the market
for paparazzi misconduct by buying a photograph taken under
circumstances that his paper described as so intimidating and
dangerous. Daily News owner and copublisher Mortimer
Zuckerman said he would have to call me back. He didn't.
Three `Precious Words'
Jeff Greenfield, who has just joined CNN from ABC, proves
why he may be one of the smartest people on television. On
Larry King Live, he's asked what he thinks of Linda Tripp
having charged today that she was present at 2:00 a.m. in
Lewinsky's apartment when the president called one night. His
answer: ``Well . . . since I was not in the room, have not
talked to Linda Tripp, have not talked to Monica Lewinsky,
have not heard the tape . . . I think the best course of
action is for me to say, `I don't know.' And, you know, I am
beginning to think those might be the three most precious
words that we all ought to . . . remember . . . This notion
of guessing . . . what . . . do we think the president, if it
was the president, might have said to Monica Lewinsky that
Linda Tripp could conceivably have heard that I haven't
talked to her about? I'll pass.''
Day 11: Saturday 1/31/98
Tripp Surfaces
The big story in the morning newspapers is that Linda Tripp
has come out of hiding to issue the statement King asked
Greenfield about the night before. Tripp charges, as the St.
Louis Post-Dispatch dutifully reports in a widely
circulated Associated Press story, that Lewinsky described
``every detail of an alleged affair with Clinton during
hundreds of hours of conversations over the last 15
months. In addition, I was present when she received a
late night phone call from the president. I have also seen
numerous gifts they exchanged and heard several of her
tapes of him.''
Another wire service story in the same edition of the Post-
Dispatch says Lewinsky lawyer Ginsburg denies that Tripp
``ever was `privy to any conversation' between Lewinsky and
President Bill Clinton.''
What's most curious about Tripp's statement is that
witnesses who are cooperating with prosecutors are routinely
forbidden from making any public statements, in exchange for
not being prosecuted themselves. (Tripp was potentially
vulnerable under a Maryland law that prohibits taping
telephone conversations without the consent of both parties.)
``She made her own decision,'' Starr later contends. ``You
can't control the actions of an independent-minded human
being.''
Day 12: Sunday 2/1/98
more from the fbi tapes
Starr's people have obviously continued to make good on
their promise to give Isikoff the best seat in the house as
they continue to trickle out the alleged contents of the
tapes they made of Tripp and Lewinsky. Now, in its new issue,
Newsweek reports that Lewinsky told Tripp that she had told
Vernon Jordan she would not sign the affidavit stating she
did not have sex with the president until he got her a job.
In another article, Newsweek declares that the magazine
``has learned that [in his Jones deposition] Clinton swore he
never met alone with Lewinsky after she left the employ of
the White House. . . . But Newsweek has confirmed that
Clinton and Lewinsky did in fact meet last Dec. 28, and
investigators are examining the possibility of several
other occasions on which the two met alone.''
When Clinton's deposition is revealed three weeks later,
the premise of this scoop would turn out to be wrong; the
president did not say he hadn't met alone with Lewinsky.
Day 13: Monday 2/2/98
an all-time high
Most of the nation's newspapers report that polls show the
president's popularity to be at an all-time high. Meantime,
Susan Schmidt and Bill McAllister of the Washington Post lead
with Star saying ``his investigation of the Monica Lewinsky
matter is moving swiftly.''
Day 14: Tuesday 2/3/98
no secret service agent
On the Evening News, CBS's Pelley says he has ``learned
that the Secret Service has conducted an internal inquiry and
now believes that no agents saw any liaison between the
president and Monica Lewinsky.''
``I liked that scoop better than Jackie Judd's,'' Pelley
says later.
Day 15: Wednesday 2/4/98
the journal pushes the button
Just before 4:00 p.m. Wall Street Journal reporter Glenn
Simpson tells White House deputy press secretary Joe Lockhart
that the paper needs comment for a story charging that White
House steward Bayani Nelvis has told a federal grand jury
that he saw President Clinton and Lewinsky alone in a study
next to the Oval Office, and that after the two left he
recovered tissues with ``lipstick and other stains'' on them.
Lockhart says he'll get back to Simpson quickly.
Fifteen minutes later, and without waiting for Lockhart,
the Journal publishes the story on its Internet site.
``When I told [Journal Washington bureau chief Alan] Murray
that Joe was going to get right back to me, Alan told me it
was too late.'' Simpson says later. ``He had already pushed
the button.''
``The White House had taken the position [in general] that
it was not commenting,'' Murray says. ``So I figured, why
wait?''
Murray, who refuses comment on whether Starr's office was
the source for the story except to say, ``I can promise you
we had sources outside of Starr's office.'' concedes that he
had heard that ABC was also on the story and that he wanted
to beat them. Murray, who is known around Washington as an
especially careful, responsible journalist, also acknowledged
that his paper had just completed a joint venture agreement
with NBC to provide editorial content to its CNBC cable
network (which offers financial news during the day and talk
shows at night) and that, ``yes, it was in my mind that we
could impress them with this.'' However, Murray also
points out that because the Journal has long operated a
wire service, ``making instant publishing decisions was
not new to us.''
``They got too excited and Alan rushed to get on
television,'' asserts one veteran Journal reporter, who says
he has knowledge of the decision to publish.
Indeed, Murray appears on CNBC minutes after he pushes the
button on his website reciting the Nelvis story. Almost
immediately, the White House press office denounces the
story, and Nelvis's attorney, who seems to be cooperating
with White House lawyers, calls the story ``absolutely false
and irresponsible.''
By the time the actual newspaper would go to bed later that
evening, the Journal would pull back. It will report that the
steward described the incident in question to Secret Service
personnel, not to the grand jury.
When the paper sees daylight on February 5, White House
press secretary Mike McCurry will denounce the Journal's
online story--and its failure to await comment from him--as
``one of the sorriest episodes of journalism I've ever
witnessed.''
By Monday, February 9, the Journal would be forced to
report that ``White House steward Bayani Nelvis told a grand
jury he didn't see President Clinton alone with Monica
Lewinsky, contrary to a report in The Wall Street Journal
last week.'' And Journal managing editor Paul Steiger would
be quoted in the same story as saying, ``We deeply regret our
erroneous report of Mr. Nelvis's testimony.''
Could it be that Judd's report on Sunday night about a
``witness'' catching the president in the act, and The Dallas
Morning New's dead-wrong, one-sourced, fifth-hand report on
Monday night about a Secret Service agent being ready to
testify, and this report about Nelvis testifying or, as it
later became, about Nelvis telling a Secret Service agent
what he had seen, are all different versions of the same
story? ``Yes, I am sure it's all the same story,'' says
Victoria Toensig (the lawyer whose conversations that her
husband had overheard became the ``source'' for the Dallas
Morning News story).
Of course, it could ultimately turn out that a credible
witness claiming to have seen the president and Lewinsky in a
compromising position--or claiming that Nelvis told him or
her about that--does come forward. By late-May, rumors would
persist that Starr would produce at least that much. But the
point is that, in early February, when these stories are
published, they are at best third-, fourth-, or fifth-hand
claims and the reporting of them as breakthrough news is a
scandal.
no other bites
It's near 6:00 p.m. and the networks have to decide how to
handle the Journal's scoop.
ABC goes halfway, saying Nelvis has been called as a
witness and ``he might have been in a position to observe Mr.
Clinton without the president's knowledge.''
At NBC, ``[vice president of NBC News] Bill Wheatley,
[Nightly New's executive producer] David Doss, and I were
standing in a cubicle at 5:50 talking into a conference phone
with Tim Russett,'' Tom Brokaw recalls. ``The Journal's
website story moving toward a full-blown story. But we
decided, after talking to Tim, that it didn't have legs.''
``We almost went with the Journal story,'' CNN's head
of newsgathering, Eason Jordan, says. ``But the rule we
put in place after the Dallas Morning News screwup stopped
us.
``The difference between this and Watergate,'' says Brokaw,
``is what I call the Big Bang Theory of Journalism. There's
been a Big Bang and the media have expanded exponentially. .
. . Back then, you had no Nightline, no weekend Today or Good
Morning America, no Internet, no magazine shows [except 60
Minutes], no C-Span, no real talk radio, and no CNN or MSNBC
or Fox News doing news all day. . . . As a result of all
that, the news process has accelerated greatly. . . .
Something, some small piece of matter, maybe a rumor, can get
pulled into the vacuum at night on a talk show or in the
morning on Imus [the nationally syndicated radio show that is
a bastion of smart, irreverent political conversation] and
get talked about on radio or on CNN or MSNBC during the day
and pick up some density, then get talked about some more or
put on a website
[[Page H5265]]
that afternoon and pick up more density, and by late
afternoon I have to look at something that has not just shape
and density but some real veneer--and I have to decide what
to do with it. That's kind of what happened with this one.''
Brokaw's description of the care he took in this instance
of the unsubstantiated Wall Street Journal story is
impressive. And his assessment of the way the new technology
of 24-hour cable channels and websites has forever turned the
old news cycle into a tornado is right on the money. But the
often sorry performance of his own news organization--for
example, in chasing Judd's ABC ``scoop'' by rushing on that
Brokaw-Shipman ``bulletin'' the prior Sunday of an
``unconfirmed report'' of a witness, let alone NBC's airing
on sister channels MSNBC and CNBC of any and all rumors--
makes it impossible not to conclude that Brokaw is describing
an out-of-control process that he and his colleagues are
often part of. He's like the articulate alcoholic at an AA
meeting.
Day 16: Thursday 2/5/98
No `Jam Job':
The New York Times ``bulldog'' edition comes out tonight
with a Friday morning story that punctures the revelry among
those who hear about it at the White House state dinner for
British Prime Minister Tony Blair. It's about Clinton
secretary Betty Currie having not been at work for
``several'' days because she was with Starr's people. Among
other things, says the Times, Currie has spoken of having
retrieved some presidential gifts from Lewinsky, and about
how she had been called into the Oval Office the day after
President Clinton faced those surprise Lewinsky questions
at his Jones deposition and was taken by the president
through a series of rhetorical questions and answers.
The article, by Jeff Gerth, Stephen Labaton, and Don Van
Natta, Jr., seems to be yet another relying on prosecutorial
leaks rather than Watergate-like firsthand reports from
witnesses. In fact, in our interview, Starr acknowledges that
he personally had met with Labaton and Gerth about the story,
although, he says, ``My understanding was that they knew the
substance of it . . . I only wanted to talk to them about its
timing,'' Starr urges me to talk to his deputy, Bennett--who,
he says, had ``talked more extensively with the Times for the
story.'' As for why he had not been quoted by name if the
discussion was not improper, Starr says only that Bennett
``knows about the ground rules.''
But Bennett refuses to discuss the ground rules, while
asserting that he was ``in no way a source for the
information in the Time's Betty Currie story.'' No one at the
Times will discuss their sources for this or any other story,
but one top Times editor points out that the reporters could
not have cared about discussing the timing of the story with
Starr because ``we ran it in the next available paper'' after
that meeting.
Prepared over several days--``this was not some Sue Schmidt
jam job,'' says one Times reporter--the Time's Currie story
would stand out nearly four months later as the most damaging
to the president--and the one whose basic facts had not been
challenged. But although it is precisely written and careful
not to draw conclusions, it will not be read by the rest of
the press with the same precision.
coached
On Nightline, Ted Koppel scraps a planned show on the
International Monetary Fund. He opens by announcing ``a
later-breaking story'' that ``the president's personal
secretary is said to have told investigators that she was
coached by President Clinton to say things she knew to be
untrue.''
``This was a breaking story, and the opening has to be
written very quickly,'' Koppel later recalls. ``But right
after that I quoted the Time's language exactly. . . . Our
opener is like a magazine cover or news headline; it
frequently will use a grabbier verb or adjective than is used
later on.''
Nightline guest Sam Donaldson also repeats the word
``coached,'' Only NPR's Nina Totenberg, another guest, is
more careful: ``This story . . . is fairly clearly a leak
from the prosecutor's office and with the exception of [the
gifts] . . . it is their characterization of what Betty
Currie has said,''
By the next morning, Currie's lawyer--who was quoted deep
down in the original Times article saying that Currie was
not ``aware of any illegal or ethical impropriety by
anyone''--would issue a statement declaring that it is
``absolutely false'' that his client believed that Clinton
``tried to influence her recollection.'' The White House,
meanwhile, offers its own spin on the Clinton session with
Currie: The president was simply refreshing his own
memory.
Whatever the full story, what matters is that the Times
didn't spin it one way or the other, while the rest of the
press did.
``Everyone said we said `coaching,' but we didn't,'' Gerth
recalls later. ``There was a lot of deliberation here over
what words went into that story. . . . The story as written,
not as interpreted, was accurate.''
``I still have no idea whether she was coached or not,''
says Times Washington bureau chief Oreskes. ``We were acutely
aware of the fact that we were dealing with descriptions and
partial descriptions that were secondhand.''
Day 17: Friday 2/6/98
Counterattack
The morning shows are filled with talk about the president
``coaching'' Betty Currie, as are the newspaper headlines.
(``Prez Told Me To Lie,'' screams the New York Post.)
But by the afternoon, the White House has turned the day
around. First there is the president's relaxed, effective
performance at his afternoon joint press conference with
Prime Minister Blair. Then there's a counterattack from his
lawyer, David Kendall, who bashes Starr for alleged unlawful
leaks and distributes a 15-page letter to Starr that claims
to document them.
Kendall's slam works so well that the NBC, ABC, and CBS
evening news shows lead with it. The only talk about the
Times Betty Currie story--the stuff of the Nightline show the
night before--comes by way of explaining that this is the
latest leak that the Clinton lawyers are so angry about.
The reason it's working has to do with the dynamics of the
media. True, the press loves a good crime investigation
and loves reporting the leaks that trickle out. But even
more, reporters love a one-on-one fight. It's more
dramatic easier to understand--and it makes booking pro
and con guests on the talk shows a breeze.
``We'd been talking about leaks since this started.'' says
White House spin man Paul Begala. ``But sometimes you just
have to get up and scream it and start a food fight to get
them to write about it.''
``Because we decided not to get into specific denials of
most of this stuff, we could not answer with facts,''
concedes former White House scandal counsel Lanny Davis. ``So
we answered with a fight about the process and the
prosecutor.''
showing their colors
Now it has become a Starr-Clinton food fight, the reporters
on the talk shows are even more tempted to show their real
colors. Rather than ``analyze'' what is happening in the
investigation, tonight they are called upon to take sides. It
is almost scary to watch people who sell themselves as
unbiased reporters of fact by day become these kind of fierce
advocates at night once the camera goes on.
A good example is Stuart Taylor, Jr., the serious,
scrupulous, and brilliant senior writer for the National
Journal who virtually started all of this with a
groundreaking 1996 piece on the Paula Jones suit in The
American Lawyer that, by Newsweek's own account, had inspired
the Newsweek cover story about the case. Taylor has become
the complete anti-Clinton partisan. He makes no bones about
it, so much so that the one television show that prefers calm
analysis to food fights--The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer on
PBS--has already dropped him from his legal analyst perch. (I
was the co-owner and editor of the American Lawyer when
Taylor's Jones piece was published.)
Now, on Nightime, Taylor takes the absurd Starr position as
his own--that if prosecutors leak material coming from their
talks with witnesses as they prepare them for the grand jury,
they are not committing a crime, because only leaks from
actual grand jury testimony are crimes. That's not what the
courts have ruled, and it's a quite a bit of legalistic
derring-do, coming from someone who said 11 days earlier on
Nightline, in referring to the president, that ``innocent
people with nothing to hide who tell the truth don't need to
surround themselves with phalanxes of lawyers.'' (About six
weeks after this appearance, Taylor would begin negotiating
with Starr to take a job advising Starr and writing the
independent counsel's report to the House of Representatives,
but he would ultimately decide not to accept the offer.)
Day 18: Saturday 2/7/98
leaks? what leaks?
The nation's newspapers generally highlight Kendall's leak
charges. Many of those writing the stories, such as Schmidt
and Baker of The Washington Post, know from their own
experience the charges are true. But they can't and won't say
it.
Two days later, media reporter Howard Kurtz of The
Washington Post (who is also a contributor to this magazine)
would write a story headlined ``With Leaks, Reporters Go With
The Flow.'' In the piece, Kurtz describes the ``bizarre
quality to the weekend coverage of White House charges that .
. . Starr was illegally leaking. . . . At least some
journalists at each major news organization know whether
Starr's staff is in fact dishing on background, but the
stories are written as though this were an impenetrable
mystery.''
Day 19: Sunday 2/8/98
we can't ask
Time magazine is out this morning with a cover story
entitled ``Trial By Leaks.'' The story has a problem: It's
produced by reporters, writers, and editors who know the
truth but can't write it.
Even a wordsmith as skilled as Time senior editor Nancy
Gibbs--who, as with the first Time Lewinsky cover story, pens
the lead piece here--can't write around this problem.
Describing leaks ``so fast and steady'' that they are ``an
undergound river,'' Gibbs proceeds over five pages simply to
describe all the leaks--in essence republishing even the now-
discredited ones. But nowhere does she confront the basic
question the article raises: Aren't Starr's people leaking?
Nowhere do we find a Time reporter asking Starr what any
reporter would ask in any other story: whether he or Bennett
or anyone else in the office has talked to specific
[[Page H5266]]
reporters who are the obvious beneficiaries of leaks.
It's hardly an unimportant question. For in the entire
Lewinsky story there is a lot more evidence of Starr and some
of his deputies committing this felony than there is of the
president or Vernon Jordan committing a felony. The problem
is that the best witnesses--the witnesses with firsthand
knowledge--are the reporters and editors covering the story.
``We can't ask Starr or Bennett if they have leaked to this
or that reporter, because we are out there getting those
leaks ourselves from them,'' Time managing editor Walter
Isaacson later concedes.
tarring the times
The White House spin people are out in force today. At
noon, on CNN's Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer, top Clinton
Advisor Rahm Emanuel charges that in both the case of the
Wall Street Journal steward-witness story and the Time's
Betty Currie story, ``lawyers representing those individuals
issued statements saying these stories are blatantly false.''
Not true in terms of the Times. Currie's lawyer had simply
stated that all of the coaching interpretations of that
story--not the carefully written Times story itself--were
false. In other words, Emanuel has skillfully, and cynically,
used one bad story--the Journal's--to tar the Times story,
the facts of which no one had disputed by that morning (and
which no one has disputed as of this writing, and which
remains, with its accounts of gifts retrieved and testimony
reviewed, the single most damaging story for the president).
This raises a larger issue. Because so much of the
reporting of the Lewinsky story would turn out to be
discredited, the journalism that should not be discounted by
the public will be. That's because the average reader or
viewer, especially when pushed this way by the White House,
will not be able to discern the difference.
Day 21: Tuesday 2/10/98
a matter of honor
Geraldo asks cowboy lawyer Gerry Spence about a ``powerful
man of a certain age . . . who is accused of accepting sexual
favors from an allegedly frisky young California girl.
Gerry,'' Rivera says, ``I believe you have some folk
wisdom to impart?
Spence dives in: ``Why hasn't he told the truth about this
alleged peccadillo? . . . I was sitting in the little town of
Newcastle the other day and talking to an old cowboy. And
here's what he had to say about that. . . . `Well,' he said,
`Here's to the heights of heaven and here's to the depths of
hell, and here's to the dirty SOB who'd make love to a woman
and tell.' ''
Day 22: Wednesday 2/11/98
Alone At last
Susan Schmidt has another scoop, and it's a firsthand
report, not a leak. This morning she writes that former
uniformed Secret Service guard Lewis Fox says that he was
posted outside the Oval Office one Saturday in the fall of
1995 and he saw the president meet alone with Lewinsky for 40
minutes in the early afternoon. Schmidt makes much of this.
In her lead sentence, 40 minutes becomes ``Monica S. Lewinsky
spent part of a weekend afternoon in late 1995 alone with
President Clinton. . . .'' And that, she says, makes Fox
``the first person to publicly say that he saw the president
and Lewinsky alone together.''
But there's less here than meets the eye. Strangely, Fox is
paraphrased but not quoted in Schmidt's article because, she
later asserts, ``he refused to be quoted.'' It's a rate
article that is wholly about an on the record interview with
someone (and headlined as such) in which that person is not
quoted at all.
But it turns out that Fox had been liberally quoted in his
local Pennsylvania newspaper and on Pittsburgh television
before Schmidt got to him, saying that, yes, he had seen the
two alone, but that he doubted anything untoward could have
happened because there are so many ways to see into the Oval
Office and there is such a constant threat of interruption
from people walking in.
Why didn't Schmidt ask Fox if the two could have been
interrupted? ``I wasn't interested in his opinion,'' she says
later. ``Who care about his opinion? Clinton testified that
he was never alone with her, and this guy makes him a liar.
Period,''
In fact, when the president's deposition in the Jones case
is made public soon after this interview with Schmidt, it
turns out that Clinton did not testify that he was never
alone with Lewinsky.
``This story was a perfect example of Sue Schmidt's
attitude,'' says Clinton aide Emanuel. ``Anyone who things
the president could do something like that uninterrupted on a
f--king Saturday is either in fantasy land or doesn't care
about facts. We're all here on Saturday at 1:00. We live
here, goddamnit.''
The Good, The Bad, and The Geraldo
It is tempting to dismiss Geraldo Rivera as a sleazy
peddler. But he is also one of the smartest, best-prepared
newspeople out there.
And tonight, as with many nights of his Lewinsky circus, he
shows it. Talking about Schmidt's Washington Post story on
Secret Service officer Fox, Rivera says, ``We note, however,
for the record, that the agent's story has become . . . [in
Schmidt's hands] far more damning since he first began
talking about a week ago. Back then Fox told a local
newspaper . . . that it would've been difficult for the two
to have had a sexual encounter while in the Oval Office
because of its many windows. . . . And we also note for the
record that every allegation [about] purported eyewitness to
the president and Monica's being alone, including last week's
account of Mr. Nelvis in The Wall Street Journal, has so far
proven erroneous.''
circus or town meeting
Rivera's show is emblematic of these first three weeks of
coverage of the Lewinsky story. There was some good reporting
and some sharp analysis. But it was mixed in with so many
one-sided leaks and rumors that it was diluted into
nothingness--so much so that many opinion polls showed that a
majority of Americans believed the president to be guilty of
something he adamantly denied and about which there is not
yet nearly enough real evidence to know for sure, one way or
the other.
Brokaw may be right: Americans may be good at filtering out
the reliable from the nonreliable. It could also be argued
that, in the old days, any town meeting would have had some
crazies and gossips take the stage or whisper among the
audience the way the crazies and prosecutor-fed gossips took
to the printing presses and the electronic stage in the days
following January 21.
But in the end that only euphemizes the appalling picture
of the fourth estate presented by the first three weeks of
this imbroglio.
Because it is episodic, the log presented above does not
convey that overall picture, nor does the more subdued
coverage of later weeks in this story.
But you can remember it.
It's a blizzard of newspaper front pages and magazine
covers and every TV news show and pseudo-news show giving
this story the kind of play that no story--none, not Princess
Diana, not O.J., and certainly not Watergate--has ever
gotten.
And so much of that coverage was rumors and speculation,
that when a self-styled Committee of Concerned Journalists
did a study examining 1,565 statements and allegations
contained in the reporting by major television programs,
newspapers, and magazines in the first six days of the
circus, they found that 41 percent of the statements were not
factual reporting at all, but were ``analysis, opinion,
speculation, or judgement''; that only 26 percent were based
on named sources; and that 30 percent of all reporting ``was
effectively based on no sourcing at all by the news outlet
publishing it.''
It doesn't take Woodward and Bernstein to know that most of
those anonymous sources were from Starr's office, spinning
out stories to pressure Lewinsky or other witnesses and to
create momentum and a presumption of guilt. I have personally
seen internal memos from inside three news organizations that
cite Starr's office as a source. And six different people who
work at mainstream news organizations have told me about
specific leaks.
Here's more specific, tangible, sourced proof of the
obvious: For an internal publication circulated to New York
Times employees in April, Washington editor Jill Abrahamson
is quoted in a discussion about problems covering the
Lewinsky story as saying, ``[T]his story was very much driven
in the beginning on sensitive information that was coming out
of the prosecutor's office. And the [sourcing] had to be
vague, because it was . . . given with the understanding that
it would not be sourced.''
And, as we have seen, Starr himself conceded to me that he
talked to the Times about the Betty Currie story and often
talked to other reporters, and he has all but fingered
Bennett as 1988's Deep Throat. Moreover, his protestation
that these leaks--or ``briefings,'' as he calls them--do not
violate the criminal law, and don't even violate Justice
Department or ethical guidelines if they are intended to
enhance confidence in his office or to correct the other
side's ``misinformation,'' is not only absurd, but concedes
the leaks.
Worse still is the lack of skepticism with which the press
by and large took these leaks and parroted them.
To be sure, that kind of leak-report dynamic is common in
crime reporting, where reporters make lawmen look good and
defendants look bad by publishing stories of mounting
evidence in ongoing investigations.
Yet there's a difference here. In the typical criminal
process, all that bad publicity historically hasn't
outweighed the burden of proof and the ability of a jury to
focus on the evidence actually presented at trial. Juries are
famous for getting from ``where there's smoke there's fire''
to looking at specific evidence. But Bill Clinton is not
going to have a trial with that kind of jury. If he gets any
hearing at all, it will be an impeachment hearing--which is a
political process, a process where all the bad effects of all
the leaks could count. And absent an impeachment hearing, the
president's continuing ability to do his job will depend in
some part on his public standing.
Many now agree that it is hard to imagine that a powerful
independent counsel under no real checks and balances is what
the Founding Fathers had in mind when they wrote the
Constitution. It is harder still to imagine that a press
corps helping that prosecutor in his work by headlining
whatever he leaks out--instead of remaining professionally
suspicious of him and his power--is what the founders had
in mind when they
[[Page H5267]]
wrote the First Amendment. The press, after all, is the
one institution that the Founding Fathers permanently
protected so that reporters could be a check on the abuse
of power.
And it is impossible to imagine that what the founders had
in mind when they wrote the impeachment clause is that a
president could be brought down by that prosecutor and by
that press corps, all because a Linda Tripp had a Lucianne
Goldberg got an intern to talk into a tapped phone about sex
so they could put together a book deal.
So far, it seems that the American people understand this,
even if the press doesn't.
So maybe it's the press that needs to draw lessons from
Pressgate, not its customers. Or maybe the customers can
force these lessons on the press by being more skeptical of
the product that is peddled to them. I have three such
lessons in mind:
First, consumers of the press should ignore all
publications or newscasts that try to foist the term
``sources'' on them unaccompanied by any qualifiers or
explanation. The number of sources should be specified (is it
two or 20?) and the knowledge, perspective, and bias of those
sources should be described, even if the source cannot be
named. (Is it a cab driver or a cabinet officer, a defense
lawyer or a prosecutor?)
Second, no one should read or listen to a media
organization that reports on another news outlet's reporting
of anything significant and negative without doing its own
verification.
And, third, no one should read or listen to any media
outlet that consistently shows that it is the lapdog of big,
official power rather than a respectful skeptic.
The big power here is Ken Starr. Prosecutors usually are in
crime stories, and the independent counsel's power is
unprecedented.
This is what makes Pressgate--the media's performance in
the lead-up to the Lewinsky story and in the first weeks of
it--a true scandal, a true instance of an institution being
corrupted to its core. For the competition for scoops to toss
out into a frenzied, high-tech news cycle seems to have so
bewitched almost everyone that the press eagerly let the man
in power write the story--once Linda Tripp and Lucianne
Goldberg put it together for him.
The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the
gentlewoman from Florida (Ms. Ros-Lehtinen) is recognized for 5
minutes.
(Ms. ROS-LEHTINEN addressed the House. Her remarks will appear
hereafter in the Extensions of Remarks.)
____________________