The Pride and Perils of Fast Reporting

On a wall in his second-floor office at the Boston Globe, just to the left of his desk, Executive Editor Matthew Storin has hung more than a dozen framed pictures, posters, front pages and other mementos from his 34 years as a journalist. One item seems strikingly out of place: A front page from the Globe’s longtime archrival, the Boston Herald.

The page is dated May 26, 1983. Under the banner “Herald Exclusive” is a big, bold headline:

WHITE

WILL

RUN

Beneath the headline, the Herald reported that Kevin White, whose possible candidacy for an unprecedented fifth term as mayor of Boston had been the subject of widespread speculation, had indeed decided to seek reelection. In the highly charged atmosphere of Boston politics, this was a major scoop for the Herald--and a potentially humiliating defeat for the Globe, long the city’s dominant newspaper.

“There was only one thing wrong with the story,” Storin said recently. “It was wrong. The next day White announced he wouldn’t run. That’s why I keep that page up on the wall. It’s a constant reminder that if you don’t have it right, being first isn’t worth it.”

Being first. Getting an exclusive. A beat. A scoop. It’s the lifeblood of the working journalist, the adrenaline rush that drives reporters to work long hours, relentlessly pursuing sources and digging, digging, digging, trying to “break” the story that no one else has. The first three letters of “news” are, after all, n-e-w; by definition, reporting the news means telling someone something new, something they haven’t heard before.

But being first and being right are often incompatible. Taking the time to make one or two more phone calls or to examine one or two more documents or simply to think things through calmly--to wait for events to develop so you can be sure you are right instead of relying on fragmentary bits of information or unidentified sources who may have axes to grind--can mean getting beaten by another reporter who is not quite as meticulous or who may have had a head start or better sources . . . or may be under more pressure to be first.

“To some extent, any mistake a journalist makes is partly attributable to the fact that somebody went out with it before they fully checked it out,” says Walter Isaacson, managing editor of Time magazine.

Sacrificing Accuracy

Perhaps it’s not surprising then that in today’s frenzied media climate--all news, all the time, whenever and wherever you want it--the determination to be right increasingly yields to the determination to be first, and verifiable fact increasingly gives way to erroneous, unproven, speculative and / or inadequately sourced stories--as was the case with early coverage of allegations that President Clinton had a sexual relationship with Monica S. Lewinsky.

Did Clinton and Lewinsky actually have a sexual relationship? Did the president lie about it? Did he and his friend Vernon Jordan obstruct justice by urging Lewinsky to lie about it, even enticing her to do so by finding her a good job? Did Secret Service agents or White House staffers see the president and the intern in an “intimate” moment? Did Lewinsky have a dress stained with Clinton’s semen? Did she and Clinton engage in “phone sex”? Did she send him a lurid audiocassette?

The answer to any--or all--of these questions may turn out to be a resounding “Yes.” Several news organizations reported last week that Lewinsky will testify before a grand jury that she and Clinton had a sexual relationship; they also said she had given the independent counsel’s office a dress to be subjected to DNA testing.

But accounts varied considerably on whether she will testify that Clinton urged her to dissemble about their alleged relationship, and in his only public comment on the case, Clinton denied that the relationship was sexual. Moreover, the media have yet to identify a single eyewitness to intimacy or to confirm other sensational reports. In fact, Lewinsky is now said to have acknowledged writing the three pages of “talking points” that many in the media had speculated were written by someone in the White House to guide Lewinsky’s then-friend Linda Tripp in slanting her testimony in the Paula Jones sexual harassment case.

Whatever ultimately comes out, it is clear that most of the stories published in newspapers and magazines, broadcast on radio and television and rocketed around cyberspace in the early weeks of the coverage relied primarily on hearsay, innuendo and circumstantial evidence.

According to a study of major news media by the Committee of Concerned Journalists, a research group underwritten by the Pew Research Trusts, 41% of the published and broadcast statements on Clinton/Lewinsky in the first six days of the story, were not fact but “analysis, opinion, speculation or judgment”; an additional 33% were based either on anonymous sources or on what other news media said. Only 1% of the statements were based on the generally recognized journalistic principle of two or more named sources.

Very often, an examination of the various stories shows, reports were based on secondhand and thirdhand sources--or worse. And all this was done in pursuit of a story that many feel didn’t concern anyone but the president, his family and Lewinsky in the first place--a story about alleged marital infidelity and alleged (and hardly unprecedented) lying to cover up that alleged infidelity. If the president were to admit and apologize for the affair in a national speech, 69% of Americans think the investigation by independent counsel Kenneth Starr should be terminated, according to a Time/CNN Poll last week.

“The first two weeks of Monica coverage was one of the sorriest chapters in recent American journalism,” says Marvin Kalb, who spent 24 years as a television newsman at CBS and NBC and is now executive director of the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government.

“Why did people engage in such sloppy reporting?” Kalb asks. “Because they all wanted to be first.”

‘Take Your Time’

Most Americans seem to agree.

Respondents to a CNN poll in January said by a 4-1 margin that they thought the nation’s news media were “more concerned” with being first in covering the Clinton/Lewinsky story than they were with being “certain that a news story is accurate before they report it.”

In recent months, most of the media have been much more careful in covering the story. Last week, for example, when Wolf Blitzer of CNN got early word that independent counsel Kenneth Starr had granted Lewinsky immunity from prosecution in exchange for her promise to testify about her relationship with Clinton, he says he delayed going on the air an extra 15 minutes until he could find a second source to confirm his original information.

“Given the climate of this story and the highly publicized mistakes that have been made,” Blitzer said, “I decided that even though I was confident I had it, I was going to wait until I had a second good source, even if I got beat.”

The “central lesson” of the Clinton/Lewinsky story is clear, Tim Russert, Washington bureau chief for NBC and host of “Meet the Press,” said in an interview in late May: “Take your time. Go slow. If that means somebody else is first . . . so be it.”

But not everyone has learned that lesson--not even Russert. He went on the air in mid-July and said, “There are lots of suggestions coming out of people close to Ken Starr that perhaps” a Secret Service agent had been “an accomplice in trying to cover up” the alleged Clinton/Lewinsky relationship. Charles Bakaly, Starr’s spokesman, immediately denied that his office had been the source of this information. Russert then modified his report to say his sources had been “congressional,” although he did not retract or apologize for his original story, which at the least implied that Starr’s office had been his source.

There are few stories on which sacrificing accuracy for speed could have greater consequences for the media and--more important--for the public than stories suggesting that the president of the United States may be guilty of impeachable offenses and criminal behavior. But the journalistic rush to be first long predates the current scandal, and it is by no means limited to political reporters.

Journalists who cover subjects ranging from business to science to entertainment to sports have long been driven by the same desire to be first. In Detroit, says Robert McGruder, executive editor of the Free Press, the two most competitive beats are the Red Wings hockey team and the automobile industry; McGruder still glows when he talks about the Free Press beating the other local and national media last spring to the story that Edsel Byrant Ford II, great-grandson of Ford Motor Co. founder Henry Ford, would soon be leaving the company.

Five months earlier, when the Wall Street Journal learned that Mattel Inc. planned to give the Barbie doll a “wider waist, slimmer hips and--in a stunning front-end realignment--a reduction of her legendary bust line,” Paul Steiger, the Journal’s managing editor, says he “lived and died, worried that the scoop would leak” before the Journal went to press.

Admittedly, that story was “mostly something that people smiled and laughed over,” Steiger says, “but it had significant business implications for Mattel--a different marketing strategy for their most important product--and that means something to our readers. We wanted to be first on it.”

Fierce Competition

In many cities, competition to break a big sports story--the retirement or trade of a superstar athlete, for example--is as fierce as any battle among high-profile Washington correspondents. But Washington is, historically, the most competitive news city in the country, if not the world. News is a particularly perishable commodity there, with thousands of reporters battling one another every day to be first, always aware that their bosses will know immediately if they are beaten. In the media hothouse of Washington, sources with their own agenda often capitalize on the journalistic compulsion to be first by leaking false information to reporters or using them to float a trial balloon, confident that the reporters will be so eager to break the story that they will not take the necessary time to check it out.

Although the desire to know something before anyone else--and to boast of that knowledge to others--is a normal human impulse, the impulse is especially virulent in journalists.

“Why do reporters want to be first?” asks Susan Carpenter McMillan, who has learned to exploit that journalistic imperative in her work as a spokesman for Paula Jones and various conservative causes. “Isn’t that like asking why the pope prays?”

At ABC News, there is a telephone line to which everyone in the division has access, so “even if it’s the middle of the night when you get a story nailed and you can’t go on the air with it then, you can call the 320 line [so named for its last three digits], and your bosses and colleagues will know you got it before they read it in the paper the next day,” says Linda Douglass, congressional correspondent for ABC News.

Most journalists can recall with great detail--and even greater pride--their biggest scoops, no matter how long ago they happened.

“There are few things in journalism better than that feeling that you got the story right, you got it alone and the other guys are chasing your taillights,” says Dan Rather, anchor for the “CBS Evening News.”

Rather can still remember being first 25 years ago with the story that President Richard M. Nixon would name Henry Kissinger as his secretary of State.

“We had a world beat . . . what’s known in the business as a ‘clean kill,’ ” Rather says, grinning triumphantly at the recollection. “Not only did nobody else have it, they weren’t even in the same area code. . . . I still remember it . . . like I remember catching a touchdown pass when I was in high school.”

Bill Dwyre, sports editor of the Los Angeles Times, says the “biggest moment” of his journalistic career was breaking the news that the Milwaukee Bucks were trading Kareem Abdul-Jabbar to the Lakers in 1975. Dwyre, then sports editor of the Milwaukee Journal, says that when he “walked into that room where the Bucks officially announced the trade to all the other reporters--to the world--after I had already printed it, man, that was better than sex.”

Rather and Dwyre were right in their scoops. But journalism is filled with “scoops” that turned out to be wrong--most notoriously, the Chicago Tribune headline the morning after the 1948 presidential race: “Dewey Defeats Truman.” More recently, the media were filled with erroneous reports that Arab terrorists were the prime suspects in the 1995 bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City and that a missile had blown TWA Flight 800 out of the New York sky in 1996; in June, a canned obituary on comedian Bob Hope, inadvertently posted on Associated Press’ World Wide Web site, prompted a congressman to wrongly announce Hope’s death, and that led several other news organizations to report it.

Vulnerable Credibility

No reputable journalist would admit to publishing or broadcasting a story he knew was not right, just so he could be first, of course. As, Michael Oreskes, Washington bureau chief for the New York Times, says, “There isn’t any question that getting it right is more important than getting it first. It’s not a choice because our credibility is all we have. You blow that and you’ve blown it all.”

Media credibility is especially vulnerable now. Not only have reporters made mistakes in their Clinton/Lewinsky coverage but: A columnist for the Boston Globe and a writer for the New Republic both admitted making things up. A reporter for the Cincinnati Enquirer was fired for stealing voice mail messages while doing a story on Chiquita Brands International Inc. An independent investigation showed there was “insufficient evidence” to support a widely ballyhooed story by CNN and Time magazine that had accused the United States of using nerve gas to kill American defectors in Laos during Operation Tailwind in the Vietnam War.

In a Newsweek poll last month, 62% of the respondents said these events made them “less likely to trust the media’s reporting,” compared with only 30% who said these were just isolated incidents. Not surprisingly, most journalists say these transgressions, as egregious and damaging as they were, are indeed isolated incidents, and many cite the well-known motto of Associated Press--”Get it first, but first get it right”--as their guiding journalistic principle. But even that hallowed mantra mentions “first” twice before mentioning “right,” and it’s increasingly clear that whatever they say, many reporters strive mightily to be first, even at the risk of being wrong.

“In general,” ABC’s Douglass laments, “the pain and punishment you suffer for being wrong is not nearly as great as the pleasure and the credit you get for being first.”

Penalty Can Be Severe

The penalty for being wrong can be severe on occasion. Journalists can be fired (as some were after the recent series of media embarrassments), and news organizations can be forced to pay large sums of money (as the Cincinnati Enquirer did after its Chiquita stories and as several news organizations did after describing Richard Jewell as the primary suspect in the bombing at the Olympic Games in Atlanta in 1996). But top news executives are rarely fired over such errors--none were in any of these cases--and Pulitzers and Peabodies are routinely showered on news organizations that beat the competition.

Although most journalists insist that they try to be first to better serve their readers and viewers, it is the hunger for glory, for recognition--recognition from one’s peers, rivals, bosses, colleagues and sources--that most often fuels the drive to be first.

There is, after all, a substantial difference between being first and being current. The public is clearly served by a news organization that provides timely coverage of the day’s events. That’s the difference between a daily newspaper or television newscast and a monthly magazine--the difference between journalism and history.

“The best of journalism doesn’t sit on its ass; it produces the copy,” says Marvin Kalb. When done properly, “the best journalism is hot, fast, first instinct, burst of energy, do it, get it done, let me learn what you’ve just learned. . . . If you find out more tomorrow, tell me tomorrow.”

Often, Kalb and others say, reporters who want an extra day or two to finish a story improve that story only marginally, and it’s usually better to give readers and viewers 80% of the story today than to make them wait a day or two to get 100% (or, more realistically, 90% or 95%).

But it’s one thing to publish or broadcast a story that’s 80% complete--lacking only some detail and supplemental information--and it’s quite another to rush into print or on the air with a story that’s 80% (or less) accurate, lacking essential information and confirmation. Matt Drudge, the Internet columnist, prides himself on scoops, for example, but he has said, without apology, that his stories are “80% accurate.” Such stories don’t serve the public, regardless of the medium they appear in.

Being first is important to readers and viewers only when a story involves a “really urgent matter that they need to know about--an economic catastrophe, a coup . . . a chemical spill, a dangerous criminal at large--something where public health or safety is really a factor,” says Everette Dennis, director of the Center for Communications at Fordham University in New York. “If it’s not urgent, then I think it’s just journalistic ego . . . just doing it to beat the competition and not necessarily doing a thorough job. Then I think the reader gets cheated.”

Larry Sabato, a professor of political science at the University of Virginia and the author of “Feeding Frenzy,” a 1991 book on the news media, says: “Being first matters only to other journalists. It doesn’t matter at all to the public. We could care less about who breaks a story or whether it comes out today as opposed to tomorrow or next week unless it involves potential nuclear war or something else that directly and substantially affects our lives.” The rush to be first is “purely personal and professional competition . . . an ego thing.”

Ego gratification has its material rewards as well. Lucrative speaking engagements and book contracts often accrue to journalists who are frequently--and flashily--first. Not surprisingly, 70% of the respondents in a nationwide Newsweek magazine poll last month said reporters are now more concerned than ever before with becoming celebrities or making money from personal fame.

Many working journalists in the print and broadcast media alike concede that public service is not necessarily the primary objective in the rush to be first.

Walter Isaacson, Time magazine: “It’s largely a matter of institutional ego.”

Tom Brokaw, anchor for NBC’s “Nightly News”: “It’s mostly ego . . . mostly bragging rights.”

Robin Sproul, Washington bureau chief for ABC News: “We care much more in the industry about this issue of [being] first than the general public cares. The general public is not sitting there with five TVs [the way I am], trying to see who, by 30 seconds, got the first word on . . . any story.”

Dennis Britton, editor of the Denver Post: “It’s strictly an ego thing. . . . The bottom line is our readers and viewers don’t . . . give a damn. What our readers care about is getting information that is clear, complete and understandable. . . . They don’t even know who got it first. . . . I don’t recall ever in my entire life going to a cocktail party with real people and hearing someone say, ‘Gee, did you see the New York Times beat the Wall Street Journal’ ” on that story.

But the ego burnishing vs. public service argument is not completely one-sided, and the desire to be first is clearly not without benefit to the public. As George Stephanopoulos, former White House press secretary and now a commentator for ABC News, puts it:

“All ‘public’ professions are fueled by a mix of ambition and idealism, and journalism is no exception. The rush to be first is about both--serving the public and advancing in your career.”

‘Time Is Money’

How does the rush to be first serve the public?

On stories involving money--changes in interest rates, fluctuations in the stock market, news of corporate mergers--the more quickly a reader or viewer learns something, the more quickly he can act, whether it’s buying or selling a stock, investing in the bond market or buying, selling or refinancing a house.

“Being first is more important for a business publication than for any other kind of publication,” says Paul Steiger of the Wall Street Journal. “You exist to help people manage and invest their money, and in this day and age, the cliche is true--time is money.”

Thus, reporter Steven Lipin has become one of the Journal’s (and its readers’) most valued reporters by breaking stories on one major corporate merger or acquisition after another--among them, WorldCom and MCI Communications, Chrysler and Daimler-Benz, and Chemical Bank and Chase Manhattan.

Other journalists say being first can be equally important to society at large on non-business stories. The very effort to be first energizes a news staff, making reporters more alert, more aggressive and more productive, more likely to work harder and dig deeper, more determined to go out looking for the news rather than waiting around the office for the news to come to them. All that makes for a better, more vital newspaper, newsmagazine or news broadcast and can create a self-perpetuating phenomenon: When reporters get exclusives, that’s good for the morale of the entire news organization, which makes everyone work that much harder to produce an even better news report.

“If a news organization doesn’t have the desire to be first,” says Bill Boyarsky, city editor of the Los Angeles Times, “it results in an overall slackening, a laziness, an attitude of ‘Oh yeah, that’s a great idea; I’ll look at it tomorrow.’ ”

Reporters and editors alike say that powerful interests--in government, big business and elsewhere--are more likely to be held accountable when journalists are competing against one another, and the race to be first is often a major element in that competition. It is for that reason that many journalists bemoan the demise of the two-newspaper town.

In 1928, when Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur wrote “Front Page,” the classic play about the Chicago newspaper wars (built around reporters battling over an exclusive interview with an escaped murderer), almost 300 U.S. cities had competing daily newspapers; today there are only 29--and 18 of them function under “joint operating agreements” (shared business operations but separate editorial departments).

“All other things being equal, corruption is less likely to be ferreted out in one-newspaper towns than in two-newspaper towns,” says Alan Murray, Washington bureau chief of the Wall Street Journal.

Karla Garrett Harshaw, editor of the Springfield (Ohio) News-Sun, began her career as a reporter for the Dayton (Ohio) Daily News when Dayton had two daily newspapers, and she remembers how concerned she was every day with what stories her competitor at the Dayton Journal got--and how hard she worked to avoid being beaten. But the Daily News and the Journal merged in 1986, and “to some extent,” Harshaw says, “we became maybe a little more relaxed when we weren’t up against the other paper.”

Although editors often serve as a check on aggressive reporters, insisting that they get more information and more confirmation and refusing to publish a story that does not seem solid enough--even if that means being beaten by the competition--most editors also share their reporters’ desire to be first.

Reporters at news organizations large and small know that if they get beaten on a story, their editors will “come down pretty hard” on them, as Harshaw puts it. In a highly competitive situation--whether it’s Washington or a small two-newspaper town--reporters always worry about having to explain to their bosses why their rivals got a story before they did.

There is a downside to competition--and competitive editors--too, of course.

“When you’re behind and . . . getting hammered by [your] . . . bosses--’You got beat again, you got beat again, you got beat again’--you’re so desperate to break one of these [exclusives] . . . that there’s a risk that you’ll get driven into jumping too fast” and making mistakes, says Tom Bettag, executive producer of ABC’s “Nightline.”

Reaping Benefits

Still, most journalists think competition is ultimately good for journalism. News sources are more likely to call reporters who are aggressive, ahead of the pack, determined to be first, says Jonathan Wollman, Washington bureau chief for Associated Press. Such reporters may get better, more accurate information, and “the readers benefit [because] . . . your next story is fuller, better.”

Moreover, says John Broder, White House correspondent for the New York Times, reporters who are breaking new ground on a story can give their audience “fresher and, I would argue, more honest” information because their sources aren’t simply “responding to a news account that’s already been out there. . . . They don’t have a chance to calibrate their responses to what’s been out there first.” As a result, Broder says, sources are “less likely to be deceptive, canned, rehearsed.”

That freshness and candor are especially important on breaking news stories, when sources are being asked the same questions dozens of times a day. But not every story is a highly competitive breaking story. Some reporters are all alone on “scoops”--as Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of the Washington Post were for a long time on Watergate, for example, when most other news organizations seemed inclined to accept the judgment of Ronald Ziegler, the White House spokesman, that the break-in was just “a third-rate burglary attempt.”

Other “scoops” are what journalists call “connect-the-dots” stories, stories in which one reporter is the first to see a pattern--and put into context--several seemingly unrelated events. Randy Shilts of the San Francisco Chronicle provided this kind of “What Does It All Mean” reporting in the early 1980s with his coverage of the AIDS epidemic, and John Crewdson of the Chicago Tribune did it in 1996 with an examination of the need for special equipment and trained personnel to cope with medical emergencies on commercial airliners.

Most journalists agree that the public is also served--and often served better--by those reporters who worry more about being best than about being first, who try to provide the definitive story rather than the exclusive story, who take all the time necessary to produce thoughtful, comprehensive stories or series, even if they are not the first--or the second or third--to report on a given subject.

“There’s a more rich and meaningful story to be told about systemic issues in society . . . if you take enough time to be thorough, put it context and explain, and that’s hard to do [while] running to be first,” says Jim Naughton, formerly a longtime top editor at the Philadelphia Inquirer and now president of the Poynter Institute for Media Studies in St. Petersburg, Fla.

Naughton says good news organizations should try to be first on fast-breaking daily stories and more reflective on the “analytical and complete” stories where speed is not a concern. But like many other journalists, Naughton worries that in today’s frenzied media environment, too many reporters think they have to chose between the two, and their top priority--sometimes their only priority--is to be first.

Next: The 24-hour news cycle, the almighty dollar and the dramatically accelerated rush to be first.

Jacci Cenacveira of The Times’ editorial library assisted with the research for these stories.

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Soft Sources

The first six days’ coverage of the relationship between President Clinton and Monica Lewinsky was largely based on anonymous sources, analysis and punditry, according to a detailed examination of 1,565 statements and allegations in the major media.

Journalist analysis/punditry: 41%

1 named source: 25%

Reporting attributed to 1 anonymous source or other media source: 20%

2 or more anonymous sources: 13%

2 or more named sources: 1%

Source: Committee of Concerned Journalists

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Rushed and Wrong

In their rush to be first, the media often make mistakes, as some did in suggesting that a missile had downed TWA Flight 800 in 1996 and that Arab terrorists were the prime suspects in the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing.

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Confessions

Media credibility has been undermined by a recent series of high-profile embarrassments, in print and on the air. Reporters and producers have been fired, stories retraced and apologies made.