Monica’s Story: A Lesson in Restraint

It’s ironic. Doubly ironic. Two of the reporters who were out front early on the story about President Clinton’s alleged affair with Monica S. Lewinsky--and who suffered the most criticism for triggering the media frenzy that ensued--were actually the most restrained in their initial reports. Or, perhaps more precisely, they were the most restrained by their bosses.

Michael Isikoff of Newsweek had been investigating reports about the president’s alleged extramarital sex life for more than a year. He spent so much time on the story in 1997--without producing anything solid enough to be published--that his editors reprimanded him and urged him to work on other stories.

Isikoff’s persistence paid off, though. By mid-January, he had an exclusive story that he felt was ready for publication--a story that said Atty. Gen. Janet Reno had given Kenneth Starr, the independent prosecutor, authorization to expand his investigation into charges that the president might have lied, suborned perjury and obstructed justice to cover up his alleged affair with Lewinsky.

But Starr’s office urged Newsweek to delay publication rather than risk compromising its ongoing investigation, and Ann McDaniel, Washington bureau chief of the magazine, was concerned that “we didn’t know who Monica Lewinsky was, what would be motivating her. We had heard her voice on tape [recordings made by her then-friend Linda Tripp], we had others telling us lots about her, but we had no opportunity to question her or her lawyer or a family member or somebody who could tell us something.”

Richard M. Smith, the editor in chief of Newsweek, shared McDaniel’s concerns. As the magazine approached its deadline on Saturday night, Jan. 17--amid what Isikoff later characterized as his own “vociferous objections”--Smith decided to delay publication.

“We talked about the standards for going with the story,” Smith says, “and I said, ‘If these standards aren’t met, the standards don’t change just because midnight Saturday night is approaching.’ ”

Weighing Delays

Smith wasn’t just being high-minded. In exchange for delaying its story, the magazine hoped to get first crack at the early fruits of Starr’s ongoing investigation, perhaps including any “sting” tape recordings Starr might have Lewinsky make of conversations with Clinton.

Someone, though, leaked word of Isikoff’s story--and Newsweek’s decision--to Matt Drudge, the Internet columnist, and he reported the essence of the story and the delay. Several days later, having decided that further reporting brought the story up to Newsweek’s standards--and having seen Drudge, ABC, the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times all run stories on the expanded Starr investigation--Newsweek finally decided to publish the story on its America Online site, rather than wait until its next issue.

Jackie Judd of ABC News had an experience strikingly similar to Isikoff’s. She had her first Clinton/Lewinsky story ready to air late Tuesday night, Jan. 20, three days after Isikoff lost his argument with his editors but before his story ran on America Online. She wanted “Nightline” to use her story that night. But most of ABC’s top news personnel were in Havana for the upcoming meeting between Pope John Paul II and Cuban leader Fidel Castro. Vigorous debates went on in person and over the phone among Havana, New York and Washington.

“When I first heard about the story . . . it was the fact of the tape recording and the fact that there was the intern,” says David Westin, president of ABC News. “It changed significantly . . . into a story that there’d been an expansion of the authority of the independent counsel. . . . My concern was that if it had changed that much over the course of two or three hours, if we waited another hour, might it change yet again?”

ABC executives decided not to rush the story onto “Nightline,” even though they knew the Washington Post was about to break its first Clinton/Lewinsky story, in an edition that would hit the streets about the time “Nightline” aired.

“That was hard, a really, really excruciating” decision, says Tom Bettag, executive producer of “Nightline.” “Lots of people [including Judd] will tell us we made the wrong decision, but . . . when you’re making this kind of charge against the president of the United States, you gotta get it right before you get it first.”

Judd stayed up all night working the story. She says she got additional confirmation, and early Jan. 21, her story ran on ABC’s radio network, its Web site and--at 7 a.m.--on “Good Morning America.”

Four days later, Judd set all Washington abuzz with another report, this one an exclusive that ABC introduced as a “critical development” in the case: “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,” Judd said on ABC’s “This Week With Sam Donaldson and Cokie Roberts.”

Judd did not say who her sources were, how many sources she had or what the sources’ affiliations or allegiances were. She had not spoken to the alleged eyewitness herself and didn’t know who the eyewitness was or even, as she conceded on the air, whether the alleged witness was a Secret Service agent or a member of the White House staff.

But Bettag says network executives felt they had “underestimated” Judd on her first Clinton/Lewinsky story, and “that did, without question, accrue to” her advantage when she wanted to broadcast the eyewitness story.

The New York Times, meanwhile, had been working on its own eyewitness story. Having been beaten by the Washington Post on Watergate--and by virtually every other major news organization on the first Clinton/Lewinsky stories--the Times was determined to recoup, and the pressure to break stories was considerable.

“Did I care about getting exclusives?” asks Joseph Lelyveld, executive editor of the Times. “I sure did. Was it the most important thing in the story? Certainly not. Did we make it seem around here for some days that this was the most important thing in the story? Probably.”

When Michael Oreskes, the Washington bureau chief of the paper, saw Judd’s eyewitness story, he thought the paper had been scooped again. But he also regarded Judd’s report as “more proof that our story was true,” and Times editors decided to give their eyewitness story the lead position on Page 1 of the next day’s paper.

Then, about 6 o’clock that evening, the two Times reporters working on the story walked into Oreskes’ office and said the story was “falling apart,” in the words of John Broder, one of the reporters. “The more I push on it, the more it crumbles.”

Although Lelyveld says the Times had the story “triple-sourced,” Broder says he ultimately concluded that the sources were intermediaries at several removes from the actual eyewitness--if one in fact existed. Judd’s report was, he decided, “at best thirdhand and at worst imaginary.” He told Oreskes he didn’t think he could--or should--write the story. When Oreskes heard Broder’s concerns, he called New York. The story was canceled.

Five days later, the Dallas Morning News published a similar story--first on its Web site, then in an early edition of the next day’s paper. That story said a Secret Service agent had witnessed Clinton and Lewinsky in a “compromising situation” in the White House. Nine days after that, the Wall Street Journal published on its Web site a story that said Bayani Nelvis, a White House steward, had told the grand jury he had seen Clinton and Lewinsky alone together in a study adjacent to the Oval Office.

Rumors and Echoes

Both stories were quickly denied. The Journal and Morning News retracted them. But Judd stands by her story, and Westin supports her.

“I have no reason to believe that we aren’t exactly right in what we reported,” he says.

Nevertheless, more than six months later, no eyewitness has emerged publicly, many journalists have questioned Judd’s reporting and several remain skeptical that there are any eyewitnesses. Some Washington reporters think the various stories about an alleged eyewitness may be distant echoes of whatever Nelvis may or may not have seen and may or may not have said to Secret Service agents or others.

Wolf Blitzer, White House correspondent for CNN, says he had heard rumors about a Secret Service eyewitness for several days before Judd’s report but he couldn’t confirm them to his own satisfaction and still hasn’t “found anyone who’s seen anything.”

Blitzer has been criticized for rushing onto the air too quickly with unproven stories himself at times, but on this one, he said, “If I’m going to go on the air and say Secret Service agents eyewitnessed the president in a very intimate, compromising act . . . I’ll have to speak to somebody who actually saw that.”

Judd could yet be proved right, of course. After all, she was also widely criticized--and doubted--when she reported Jan. 23 that a source told her Lewinsky had said she saved a dress “with the president’s semen stain on it” (a story first reported by Matt Drudge two days earlier); last Wednesday, Judd reported that Lewinsky had given Starr’s office just such a dress for DNA testing, and several news organizations followed her scoop by reporting essentially the same thing.

The harshest criticism of Judd--and of Newsweek’s Isikoff--has come from Steven Brill, writing in the first issue of his media magazine, Brill’s Content. Brill essentially accused both--and many others in the Washington press corps--of relying too heavily on unidentified sources, of rushing into print and on the air with inadequate reporting, and of being tools for Starr, Tripp and Tripp’s literary agent, Lucianne Goldberg.

Faulting Critics

Much of Brill’s criticism of of the Clinton/Lewinksy coverage is valid. But Chris Vlasto, the investigative producer who works closely with Judd and knows her sources, says Brill is wrong in his speculation about the identity of those sources, just as he was wrong to criticize her for the story on the dress.

Isikoff and his editors at Newsweek are even more critical of Brill’s treatment of them.

Brill complained, for example, that Isikoff’s first online story ignored Lewinsky’s saying “No” in response to Tripp’s tape-recorded question, “He [the president] knows you’re going to lie. You’ve told him, haven’t you?” The implication in Brill’s story is that this “notable” omission was wrong, perhaps even intentional.

But the third paragraph of the online story said, “There was no clear evidence on the tape that would confirm or deny Tripp’s allegation that Clinton or [his friend] Vernon Jordan had coached Lewinsky to lie.” The story also said, “Newsweek could not independently verify the authenticity of the recording, and some of the statements on the tape raise questions about Lewinsky’s credibility.”

Moreover, Brill used only the portion of the taped exchange that supported his criticism of Isikoff. When Newsweek published Isikoff’s story in the magazine itself, the opening paragraphs of the story featured the full exchange, and that exchange was far less incriminating than Brill’s truncated quote implied. In that exchange, after Lewinsky says “No,” Tripp asks, “I thought that night when he called you, you established that much.” Then:

Lewinsky: “Well, I don’t know.”

Tripp: “Jesus, well, does he think you’re going to tell the truth?”

Lewinsky: “No. . . . Oh, Jesus.”

“In other words,” Newsweek said in response to Brill’s article, “Lewinsky waffles, says no, says maybe, says she doesn’t know, but leaves the impression that Clinton expects her to lie. Her exchange is ambiguous. It doesn’t really prove anything.”

Brill concedes that he should have acknowledged Newsweek’s use of the full exchange in its magazine. He says he focused on the fragment because when Newsweek staffers tried to explain why they had had originally withheld the story from the magazine “they all repeated that [partial quote] from memory. I just thought it was noteworthy that when they go online, the first time they report to their readers about this whole thing, they leave that quote out.”

Brill also defends his characterization of Judd’s sources and, with a couple of minor exceptions, he says he stands behind his entire story. Although he acknowledges that he should have disclosed having once made a campaign contribution to Clinton, he says he was certainly not trying to help the president with the Brill’s Content story. He says his intent was to write about the press and, secondarily, about Starr, as part of an ongoing interest in the role of prosecutors in the criminal justice system, a subject he examined periodically when he ran American Lawyer magazine.

Brill’s explanations notwithstanding, he does appear to have made some of the same kinds of missteps and mistakes that he accused other journalists of. As William Powers writes in the National Journal, “Brill has fallen into the trap of buying avidly into one side of a story, pushing it so hard that his piece lacks context and balance.”

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Beware: Partial Quotes

Brill’s Content, a new magazine that monitors the media, criticized Newsweek for not using Monica Lewinsky’s negative response to Linda Tripp’s first question (below) in its online story. But Brill’s Content didn’t mention the full, more ambiguous exchange in their taped conversation that Newsweek printed in full.

THE FULL QUOTE

TRIPP: He knows you’re going to lie. You’ve told him, haven’t you?

LEWINSKY: No.

TRIPP: I thought that night when he called you, you established that much.

LEWINSKY: Well, I don’t know.

TRIPP: Jesus, well, does he think you’re going to tell the truth?

LEWINKSY: No . . . . Oh, Jesus.