Letting Rivals Influence News Decisions Can Be Risky

It is one of the oldest tricks in journalism. A reporter, eager to have his story published or broadcast as soon as he has finished it--and worried that a competitor might beat him--tells his boss that his story has to run right away because he has heard that the competition is using the same story in that night’s news broadcast or in the next morning’s paper.

Tom Bettag, executive producer of ABC’s “Nightline,” says that some reporters are so eager to be first that they may even leak a story to a rival in an effort to pressure their own bosses.

“It’s not unknown,” Bettag says, “for a television journalist, sitting out in some hellhole with a story he cannot get anybody to pay attention to . . . to tell his buddy from the New York Times about it and then call . . . [his] boss and say, ‘The New York Times is going to go with this in the morning.’ This focuses the attention of the home office.”

And it often gets the story on the air. First.

Print reporters have sometimes used the same ruse, and--as in television--this puts their bosses in a difficult position. News executives do not want to disappoint their reporters or lose out to the competition, but neither do they want to rush a story into print or on the air before it is ready, just to satisfy a reporter and beat the competition.

On questionable stories, Michael Fancher, editor of the Seattle Times, says he always asks his reporters, “What’s the compelling reason go to with the information now?”

“Inevitably,” he says, “the first reply is that someone else has it or will go with it.”

Fancher says his answer to that is: “Who’s editing our newspaper--us or them?”

Wait--or Be Scooped?

The Wall Street Journal found out the hard way in February that letting someone else edit your newspaper--or your Web site--can be hazardous.

On the afternoon of Feb. 4, Journal reporters turned in a story that said Bayani Nelvis, a White House steward, had told a grand jury that he saw President Clinton and Monica S. Lewinsky alone together in a study adjacent to the Oval Office. Journal editors had to make a decision: Did they wait until the next morning’s paper to publish the story and risk being beaten, or did they put the story on the Journal’s Web site immediately and guarantee a scoop?

Journal editors have been wrestling with this problem--and availing themselves of the opportunity for instant dissemination of news--longer than most of their journalistic counterparts.

Their parent company, Dow Jones, has a 24-hour news service, and Paul Steiger, managing editor of the Journal, says he has “followed a pretty simple rule as long as I’ve been on this job: We will try to keep for the next morning’s paper any story that is important enough to make the ‘What’s News’ column on Page 1 if we’re quite confident it will stay a scoop until the morning. Otherwise, we’ll put it on the [Dow Jones] wire so our clients can see it right away. We have the same policy with our Web site.”

In the case of the Nelvis grand jury testimony, the Journal knew that ABC News’ Jackie Judd had mentioned the steward’s name in a story broadcast the previous night; she had identified him as “one of the first [grand jury] witnesses called by [independent prosecutor Kenneth] Starr . . . [someone] whose regular work station may have put him in a position to spot Mr. Clinton without the president’s knowledge.”

Judd has been out front on several Clinton/Lewinsky stories, and Alan Murray, the Journal’s Washington bureau chief, thought it was “extremely likely” that she would have the same story the Journal did on the details of Nelvis’ testimony that very night, thus depriving the paper of a scoop.

Steiger says he decided to put the story on the Journal’s Web site and give it to the Dow Jones News Service that afternoon--without waiting for a response from the White House (because, he says, the White House had not responded to any previous inquiries about the president and Lewinsky).

But Judd says she had no Nelvis story ready for that night. Of much greater concern, Nelvis’ attorney responded to the Journal’s story by saying his client had told the grand jury that he had not seen Clinton and Lewinsky alone. The Journal report, he said, was “absolutely false and irresponsible.”

Journal editors say they had several sources for their story but had not spoken to either Nelvis or his attorney, who had not returned their phone calls. They say they reported what their “multiple sources” told them Nelvis had said to other people, including Secret Service agents, but--in Murray’s words--”we made a mistake in thinking we knew he had told it also to the grand jury, and in fact he hadn’t told it to the grand jury.”

Embarrassed, the Journal apologized for its “erroneous report” on Nelvis’ testimony.

The rush to be first--running a story before the competition because you’re afraid you’ll be beaten--is a risk that news organizations seem increasingly willing to take. But it is not a new risk. What is new is a corollary development that might be called “the rush to be second”--the decision to publish or broadcast a story immediately after it’s been run by another news organization but before your own reporters have been able to confirm or refute it. When that happens--and it’s happening with growing frequency--editors really risk letting other people edit their publications or their newscasts.

Often these stories are so salacious that reputable news organizations avoid them until less reputable news organizations publish or broadcast them. Then everyone feels justified rushing into print and on the air with follow-up stories--as has been the case with several stories over the years involving Clinton and various women with whom he is alleged to have had sexual relationships.

In today’s high-pressure, instant-news environment, “this is the toughest decision of all to make,” says Leonard Downie, executive editor of the Washington Post.

Editors have to decide whether to risk lowering or violating their own standards to report what another news organization is saying or to ignore the story and risk having readers or viewers think their newspaper or television station missed the story or is covering up.

How do they decide?

“You take it on a case-by-case basis--which news organization is reporting it, what the nature of the story is, do you instinctively trust it as you read it, based on what you know, or does your smell detector go off?” says Newsweek’s Michael Isikoff, whose dogged reporting led to the first Clinton/Lewinsky stories. “When the New York Times reports authoritatively on something, that’s totally different than seeing it” in a less reliable news outlet.

But in June, two reliable news organizations launched a joint project called NewsStand: CNN & Time with an explosive first story, reported by and on CNN--charges that the United States used nerve gas to kill American defectors in Laos during the Vietnam War. Many major newspapers--including the Los Angeles Times, the Boston Globe, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and the Chicago Tribune--published brief accounts of the charges.

The story was immediately and widely criticized, and after an independent investigation, CNN retracted the story and apologized for it. Those acts seemed to confirm the judgment of editors at several newspapers--the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal among them--who had chosen not to repeat the original CNN/Time report and only covered it when government agencies promised an investigation.

A Cautious Approach

For the New York Times in particular, such restraint is part of the paper’s policy.

“I hate the argument ‘It’s out there’ as an argument for putting a story in the paper,” says Joseph Lelyveld, executive editor of the New York Times. “I think it’s not a good thing to give currency to stories you haven’t checked out.”

Lelyveld realizes, however, that “you can’t be solipsistic about it and say . . . your readers . . . have no other sources of information. If they hear [a story] on every television channel they tune in to, any radio station they hear driving home from the office . . . and the next morning, you have nothing to say about it, you’re sending them a very funny signal.”

Thus, the New York Times generally avoids using stories reported by other media, unless they are so important or so widespread that they cannot be legitimately ignored. Under those circumstances, the paper generally makes a brief, not overly prominent report on the story and notes carefully who is reporting it and what, if anything, can be independently confirmed. That’s what the New York Times did, both during the 1992 presidential primaries, when a supermarket tabloid quoted Gennifer Flowers as saying she and Clinton had had a 12-year affair, and again in 1996, when the Atlanta Journal and Constitution published an “Extra” edition to announce that Richard Jewell, the security guard who had been hailed as a hero for alerting police to a pipe bomb at the Olympic Games, had become the prime suspect in the bombing.

“We didn’t want to run that at all,” Lelyveld says, “but we felt we had to run something to show that we knew the country was being told that the bomber had been found.”

The bomber had not been found, of course, and 15 months later, the Justice Department sent Jewell a letter saying he was no longer a suspect. But most of the news media did not match the Times’ restraint in either the Jewell or Flowers cases.

On Jewell, for example, CNN broke into its afternoon programming with a bulletin on the Atlanta paper’s story, and ABC, NBC and CBS all led their evening news programs with the report. The Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, the Chicago Tribune and most other major papers put the story on Page 1 the next morning.

The problem has only gotten worse, not better, in the past year or two, as the coverage of Clinton and Lewinsky amply demonstrates.

“You can read the paper every day and see how many news organizations are reporting what other news organizations have reported,” says Bill Kovach, formerly an editor at the New York Times and the Atlanta Constitution and now curator of the Neiman Foundation for journalism fellowships at Harvard University. “They have no idea whether it’s right or wrong.”

Tom Brokaw, the anchor for NBC’s “Nightly News,” calls this the “new law of media physics: A small bit of ‘non-matter’ surfaces in talk radio or on the Internet very early in the morning, and then it pops up in some radio newscast and then there’s some fleeting mention of it on one of the morning TV new shows.

“Then local news programs begin to take hold of it, and by midday, it’s no longer non-matter but beginning to take shape and form, and people are spinning off other stories on it, and by midafternoon, where I work and at other traditional news organizations, editors are faced with a kind of non-reality reality. Does it have any merit or is it something that has been manufactured by the speed of the play that’s gotten in the last eight hours?

“That’s a huge dilemma--every day.”

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Responding to Competitors

One of the biggest challenges facing newspaper editors and television news directors today is deciding what to do with a story that’s been run by another news organization but that their own reporters have not had time to check out. Many newspapers and television stations gave big play to both a 1992 supermarket tabloid story in which Gennifer Flowers said she and President Clinton had had a 12-year-old affair and a 1996 Atlanta Journal and Constitution story that said Richard Jewell, the security guard who had been hailed as a hero for alerting police to a pipe bomb at the Olympic Games, had become the prime suspect in the bombing.