Lewinsky Scoop Diverts UCLA Student Paper From High Road

As the saga of Monica Lewinsky and President Clinton dominated the national news, staff members of the UCLA Daily Bruin tried to stay above printing gossip and tawdry details.

The students made a decision to handle the scandal story better than the national media, to abstain from playing to the lowest common denominator. They wanted to stay so far above the fray that they had chosen to run only a few, short wire service stories on the matter, and even those were deep inside the paper.

But that was before they came face to face with their own, enormous scoop--a scoop that put the paper in the national spotlight last week and left its staff dazed by the collision between good intentions and a juicy tip.

“Our lofty goals crumbled,’ said 21-year-old Hannah Miller, the Bruin’s news editor.

So did their reputations on campus. Several staffers were challenged by classmates who harassed them with ugly phone calls and angry confrontations.

It started when a UCLA political science major called the student paper Jan. 29 and claimed that he had briefly dated Lewinsky, the former White House intern alleged to have had a sexual relationship with the president.

Both Lewinsky and Clinton have formally denied that the relationship occurred. The student, Dennis Lytton, recounted a conversation during a date in which he said Lewinsky used a graphic term to describe herself as the president’s lover.

It was just the sort of story for which the professional media had been combing the country. If the Bruin nailed it down, the story would certainly bring the paper national attention. Most importantly, it had a compelling local angle--a UCLA student.

The Bruin’s 20-year-old editor-in-chief, Edina Lekovic, was wary from the beginning. She was not sure she liked the idea of running the story even if it were true. And being sure enough about the student’s truthfulness was another matter entirely.

“Every step of the way, I agonized,” Lekovic said. “I was seeing ‘sex’ as the headline.”

The call from 24-year-old Lytton came in on a Thursday night. Because the paper is only printed on school days, that gave the Bruin a full weekend to check out the story.

Under the tutelage of a faculty advisor and the paper’s professional writing coaches, the student journalists learned new ways to check what facts they could.

They started by grilling Lytton, who claimed that he had met Lewinsky while they both worked at the Pentagon in 1997.

They asked him to tell his story several times and then asked him to repeat different parts of his story, to check for inconsistencies. Student Marie Blanchard, who wrote the story, estimates that after her initial interview, she spoke to Lytton 20 times.

She and other reporters spoke to students and adults who knew Lytton, to check his overall credibility. They called the Pentagon, to confirm the dates of employment he gave. They asked where he took Lewinsky on their dates, and then cross-checked with his credit card statements to confirm that he had been to those places on the days he gave.

Still, Lekovic worried, the paper could not confirm the raciest details, which were part of an alleged conversation between two people. They could see that he had been to a certain Washington restaurant; they could not confirm with whom.

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By the time the deadline for last Monday’s paper rolled around, however, Blanchard and news editor Miller were certain enough to go with the story. And to put it on the front page.

“It was so big and it was so in our face,” Miller said. Lekovic came around.

“Somehow, the chance to tell this guy’s story and to deal with him in as much of a dignified manner as we could seemed like a fair thing to do,” Lekovic said.

For his part, Lytton has refused to recount his story to the national press, other than to say that he stands by his quotes printed in the UCLA paper.

In an interview Sunday, Lytton talked about his decision to take his story to the Bruin.

“I thought there would be a better chance they would treat me fairly and respect my privacy and dignity because they were a student newspaper and I’m a student,” he said. “My impression was that they did the very best they could to scrutinize my story.”

The Bruin offices were fairly quiet Monday morning. Blanchard thought that the rain meant that students were failing to pick up the free daily, which is piled outside in many locations.

But by Monday afternoon, Associated Press picked up their story and sent it to news outlets across the country. And then all hell broke loose.

From The Times to the Washington Post to “Hard Copy,” a slew of reporters sought out the Bruin’s editors to talk about the story. Staffers were juggling dozens of phone calls from frantic journalists. At one point, they had the New York Times on one line and a staffer from “Geraldo” on the other.

A student backlash began soon thereafter.

Furious by what they deemed the inappropriateness of the piece--which included the crude sexual phrase that Lytton said Lewinsky used--angry students stopped Blanchard and other Bruin staffers on the campus to tell them exactly what they thought of the paper’s efforts.

There were obscene phone calls, to both the paper and Blanchard. After speaking to several obscene callers, Blanchard surmised that someone had posted her number on a phone-sex board, leading users to believe that she was open to their overtures.

One editor was identified in class during a discussion of the story and asked to talk about the story.

Lekovic even got an e-mail from the 1962-63 Bruin editor. “He said something like ‘shame, shame,’ ” Lekovic said. “I really had to laugh at that point because it wasn’t the first I’d gotten.”

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On Friday, as the ruckus began to die down, the Bruin staffers mused about what they had learned about journalism, the national press corps and the public’s reaction to media hype.

The three women most closely involved--Lekovic, Miller and Blanchard--said they were glad their paper had its moment in the spotlight, even if they wished it were for a different story. They were glad they ran the story, even if they were somewhat chagrined to have become part of the tabloidization of the mainstream press.

Said Miller, who pushed Lekovic to publish the story: “I didn’t want to play that game, but I played that game and our story got on the wire--which is a big thing for a student paper.”

They were also glad for their unique insight into the profession all three think they might want to join one day--even if their recent experiences confirm long-held doubts about the journalistic mission.

“I’ve been on the receiving end of this, how ambitious and how out for blood the media is,” Lekovic said. “They’ll get anything they can. And I’m part of ‘they.’ ”