All the News That’s Not Quite Fit to Print . . .

One of the trade secrets of the newspaper business is that every so often a story comes along that’s so hot, so juicy, so ferociously competitive that it’s temporarily error-proof.

By this I don’t mean that you can’t make errors reporting it (quite the contrary), but, rather, that no one will call you on them. For a week or two or three of desperate scoop-mongering, you and your colleagues have carte blanche to put almost anything in the paper.

Misinterpretations, hearsay and innuendo get cranked into print and raked over on the talk shows as though they are profundities out of the mouths of Supreme Court justices. By the time professional rules of accuracy and fair play have reasserted themselves, no sane journalist would even try sorting everything out; isn’t that what we pay historians for?

In my career, I’ve participated in a few of these goat barbecues. For a reporter, they’re great. You can accept almost anything a source--or any slob on the street, for that matter--tells you, with no need to test the assertions against his motivations, biases, plausibility, criminal record or mental health. You just go with it.

But since the time I joined in my last such free-for-all, a new tool has come on the market that makes the retailing of folderol so much easier and, well, cleaner. That tool is the Internet.

Over the last few weeks, there has been a surge in the number of newspapers and magazines using their Web sites to float stories they’re not quite sanguine about publishing in the traditional way.

Let’s look at the record. A week or so ago, the Dallas Morning News scooped the world with a story about a Secret Service agent having witnessed President Clinton and White House intern Monica Lewinsky in a compromising position. This did not get printed in the paper; rather, it got rushed onto the Morning News Web page late one night.

Within hours, the organization was forced to pull the story as inaccurate. Not soon enough, unfortunately, to warn off ABC’s “Nightline,” which had to utter a correction the following evening.

A few days later, I noticed Dallas Morning News Washington bureau chief Carl Leubsdorf on CNN looking rather smug about the whole jolly mix-up. (And why not? It got him onto TV.) The pages of his newspaper hadn’t been soiled by its cheesy reporting--it was only the paper’s Web site. I guess the point was that standards don’t amount to much in cyberspace.

Last Wednesday night, the Wall Street Journal placed itself in a similar position, posting on its Web site a story to the effect that the president’s valet had testified to independent counsel Kenneth Starr’s grand jury that he had seen the president and Lewinsky alone.

Possibly the Journal, which has otherwise been playing its customary role of hanging back from the fray and cherry-picking the best stories, had valid reasons for hastening the story into the public domain. In any event, the valet’s lawyer called the report “absolutely false” in time to make the newspaper deadline. The Journal amended its account to say that the valet told Secret Service agents of the encounter and that whether he mentioned it to the grand jury was still in question. Thus the Journal scored the technological achievement of publishing a hot rumor and retracting it in the very same story. (Journal Managing Editor Paul Steiger said the paper stands by the latter version.)

The winner and still champ of the “having your cake on the Internet and eating it in print” tournament is Newsweek. This is the magazine that was ready to break the Lewinsky story a few weeks ago but held it for professional (and still admirable) reasons. When Lewinsky’s name got into the press a day later anyway, Newsweek displayed profound remorse--not, apparently, for having been responsible enough to hold the story, but, instead, for having thrown away the bragging rights.

So it piled everything it had-- every rumor, unsupported assertion, crass interpretation and incomplete tape transcript--onto, yes, its Web site, as if to say it would have published all this stuff in the magazine, too, had it only known how hot the story would be.

The danger of surrendering to Web site temptation should be obvious by now. Newspapers operate with checks and balances designed to flag hurried or poorly reported stories and fix or kill them before they get published. One check is the publication cycle, which provides a predictable, regular deadline by which to make difficult judgments.

It’s certainly not unheard of, or even uncommon, for papers to rush bad stories into print. But one wonders if the Internet’s open-24-hours rhythm doesn’t encourage editors more than is healthy to hasten stories out the door when they look good, rather than when they are good.

More disturbing is the apparent disrespect the papers display toward the idea of maintaining journalistic standards on the Internet. They behave as though publishing these stories on their Web sites gives them “deniability,” like politicians floating anonymous trial balloons to their pet reporters and then wringing their hands over the shame of news leaks. What it actually does, of course, is destroy the value of the Internet as a source of information.

It is no secret that the Web has long been available for ill use by the lame and the halt of the news business. One need go no further for examples than the egregious Matt Drudge (whose scoop on Monica Lewinsky’s semen-stained dress appears, thankfully, to be exclusive mostly to himself) or the doddering Pierre Salinger, who bought into an Internet report of a missile strike on TWA 800 and trumpeted it at a news conference, to well-deserved ridicule.

For respectable newspapers, however, dumping one’s weakest stories on the Web and then praising oneself for the speed with which misinformation infuses the ether is a more recent development. The ice-breaker was the San Jose Mercury News, which published a series contending the CIA was responsible for the crack cocaine epidemic in South-Central L.A. and posted its text and some of the supporting documentation on its Web site.

The Mercury then accepted congratulations for rocketing its scoop worldwide. Since the paper soon acknowledged that it omitted from its Web site a few documents contradicting its thesis and, later, that the entire thesis was inaccurate, this resembles admiring the Pinto for the speed with which it can incinerate passengers.

One of the common assertions about how newspapers are going to benefit from the rise of the Web is that the cacophony of unreliable voices blithering away over your modem will lend more value to such trusted “brand names” as, oh, the San Jose Mercury News, Newsweek and the Dallas Morning News. But if they don’t start protecting their Web pages as responsibly as they safeguard their news pages--instead of treating them as a target for hasty reporting--there won’t be any brand names worth saving. Just the dismally unedifying drone of Matt Drudge.

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Times staff writer Michael A. Hiltzik can be reached by e-mail at michael.hiltzik@latimes.com