Are Media Guilty of Rush to Judgment?

What happens if the president’s not guilty?

After a week of coverage that in volume and tone frequently seems to presume that President Clinton did something wrong, some media experts have begun to wonder whether the reports about an alleged affair with former White House intern Monica S. Lewinsky have been lopsided and unfair.

“This has been one of the most depressing chapters in American journalism,” said Marvin Kalb, director of the Shorenstein Center on Press and Politics at Harvard University.

Besides the steady drumbeat of rumor and sexual innuendo, there is also “a subtext of a presumption of presidential guilt” that Kalb and others feel has been an undercurrent in the reporting.

“‘The sheer volume of coverage could easily be seen as implying a presumption of guilt--i.e., otherwise, why would the media be devoting so much time to it,” said Andrew Heyward, president of CBS News.

Moreover, while some journalists have been cautious about making certain that charges are answered and facts are checked, the reporting of sexual rumors and uncountered charges by veteran news organizations has stunned media analysts.

One incident at CNN illustrates the pressure to go on the air instantly with developments in the story. A scant 10 minutes before Clinton’s State of the Union message Tuesday, the network reported a drama teacher’s allegations that he had had an affair with Lewinsky that began the year after she graduated from high school.

The teacher’s attorney, Terry Giles, who had held a press conference a few minutes earlier in Oregon, was shown giving his third-hand descriptions of Lewinsky’s alleged sexual activities at the White House. Giles also said: “‘Whether or not it is fact or not, it is impossible for us to know.”

With that, CNN promised more details, advertised a program about “media madness” and then turned to the president’s speech.

The details, including the context and the possible motives of Giles and his client, did not air on CNN for more than two hours.

“There are times when things are happening very quickly, and you give it as much background and context as you can,” said CNN’s Washington bureau chief, Frank Sesno.

“It was important because there was a dual message coming from Giles,” Sesno added. “He was saying that Monica Lewinsky said she’d had sex with somebody of major status, and he also cast aspersions on her character.”

By Wednesday, CNN was carefully editing Giles’ comments about the case, but NBC-TV’s “Today” program allowed Giles to say, in a fairly graphic way, that Lewinsky wanted to go to the White House to indulge in oral sex.

“Editors are torn about this,” said Bill Wheatley, a vice president at NBC News. “On the one hand, discussing such subjects on the air may be critical for the audience’s understanding of the story. On the other hand, I don’t think anybody is comfortable that these subjects are repeated on the air.”

Still, for many journalists and news organizations, the repetition of rumor quickly seems to harden into fact. And after a caveat that nothing is proved or the word “allegedly” is attached to some of the more astonishing charges, some journalists have in words or tone sent the message that they believe that something is fishy at the White House.

Time magazine this week had a startling cover with a picture of Lewinsky and Clinton over the headline, “Monica and Bill: The sordid tale that imperils the president.” In small print on the cover, Time notes that the picture was taken at a White House lawn party the day after the 1996 election.

“There was a lot of discussion about that--whether this could be misleading,” said Walter Isaacson, managing editor of Time. But he said because it remains “the best picture of the two of them,” the editors figured that it could be used as long as it was clear that “they were not caught in a private moment in the garden or such.”

Isaacson, like other media executives, defended the intense concentration on the Lewinsky matter by saying that he does not believe this will be a more dramatic and powerful version of the Richard Jewell case. Jewell, a security guard who was labeled a suspect in the 1996 bombing at the Atlanta Olympics, sued and won judgments against several news organizations after he was cleared of suspicion. “I don’t think there’s any chance of this being another Jewell--which is, ‘Oh, my goodness, everything we had is wrong and there’s nothing here.’ You do have a woman and an investigation that is not totally without merit. You have to be careful not to leap to conclusions before we get to the facts. But look, somebody is lying here to somebody.”

Some critics have begun to see a strange kind of backlash growing against the media since this story surfaced Wednesday morning a week ago. Readers and viewers say they are disgusted with the sordid nature of this news, and at the same time want to know more details.

Still, some of those details may come from sources that would not have stood the test of good journalism a few years ago.

Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz said on CNN that “people sense that we’re throwing a lot of raw stuff out there.”