Controlling the News vs. Finding the Facts

What is it that makes reporters engage in a perpetual hunt to uncover the hidden? Natural curiosity, well-motivated muckraking and the need to build circulation and ratings.

All these pressures are at play in the frantic rush to dig up the dirt in the story of President Clinton and Monica Lewinsky. That’s why it looks like the media have gone mad.

I haven’t been involved in this enterprise. But I often think about the news coverage aspects of the Monica-Bill story, a saga of politics and the law, when my rounds take me to the courthouse or the political campaign trail.

*

Monica and Bill came to mind, for example, when I was recently invited to speak to the Los Angeles County Grand Jury.

Invited, not subpoenaed. The jury, in addition to voting indictments against accused crooks, also has an oversight job, finding out whether various government agencies are doing their job. This is a kind of muckraking and the jurors wanted to hear a reporter’s view on this part of their duties.

We met in the hearing room where the jurors usually deliberate on criminal cases. I stood at a podium, with the 23 jurors looking down at me from desks arranged in an arena seating mode. To my left was the witness stand. During criminal proceedings, the witness is there alone, without a lawyer.

That’s how it is for a Clinton case witness. I thought about how scary it must be to sit in the witness box during a criminal investigation, knowing you could get nailed for perjury for a misstatement or even a mistake made under a prosecutor’s tough questioning.

Worse yet, the witness’ testimony sometimes is made public in a distorted form. Throughout this century, grand jury proceedings have supposedly been secret. But when the case is hot, forget secrecy. That’s what is happening in the Clinton investigation.

Leaks come from prosecutors, witnesses or attorneys for the witnesses. Some are strategic, such as information given to reporters by lawyers trying to influence the jury pool. Others are the result of a reporter’s skill in persuading a knowledgeable source to provide secret information. A good reporter, after all, isn’t much different than a skilled detective or a persuasive salesperson.

I told the grand jurors that I thought their criminal proceedings should be secret. Too often, leaks produce half-truths or no truth at all.

But I said there should be no hiding of the watchdog function, the muckraking work, where jurors probe the depths of county departments that themselves embrace a doctrine of secrecy.

In Los Angeles County, in fact, these proceedings are secret. The jurors couldn’t even tell me what departments they were investigating.

Our discussion was intense. I was exhausted and glad I wasn’t a witness in a criminal case.

*

On a political campaign, the problem is different, more like an overload of slanted information.

This year, the political reporters have been receiving dispatches by fax from Democratic gubernatorial candidates Al Checchi and Gray Davis.

I am particularly fascinated by the Checchi-Mail that arrives weekly, full of slams at Al’s foes. Rep. Jane Harman (D-Torrance) has been taking most of the hits lately, one of them in the form of a poem, a nonrhyming work called “Fun With Dick [Riordan] and Jane.”

I didn’t read it, my taste having been shaped at an early age by my first city editor, Al Reck, who cursed violently whenever presented with a reporter’s bum poetry or anything else in the category of cute.

Why was I being subjected to this? I called the man responsible, Darry Sragow, Checchi’s campaign manager and one of the Checchi-Mail authors.

In the old days, Sragow explained, political reporters followed candidates through long days and evenings of events and ended up the night at a bar with campaign managers who gave them the day’s spin over glasses of whiskey.

“There is a difference in who political reporters are now,” Sragow said. “The political press corps has many women, including ones with a family. And males now play a different role as parents and spouses. No one hangs out in bars anymore. The Checchi-Mail is a substitute for that kind of face-to-face contact.”

*

Maybe so. But to me it’s trying to control the flow of news, a corporate practice eagerly adopted by government and by political campaigns.

Keep the press animals at bay. Feed them with the food they love, information, even if it’s rotten. Never relax. Always order Perrier.

Confronted with that attitude, don’t blame the reporters when they look for leaks.