Journalists Weigh Standards, Scoops

On their face, the allegations on NBC’s “Dateline” aired Wednesday were unforgettable: Juanita Broaddrick, an Arkansas nursing home executive, alleged that then-Arkansas Atty. Gen. Bill Clinton sexually assaulted her in a 1978 hotel room encounter, during which she was injured.

But the machinations leading up to the broadcast--and what they reveal about the competitive pressures shaping the new media landscape--may be equally memorable. At the very least, top editors and broadcasters say, the story shows how hard it is for some news organizations to maintain standards and refuse to disseminate unproven stories while rivals beat them to the punch.

“There’s a sense of being manipulated by this strange new dynamic that exists in the media, where stories that are in the process of being reported somewhere get picked up by a Web site and by cable TV talk shows, and eventually they pick up centrifugal force and knock the story into the mainstream,” New York Times Managing Editor Bill Keller said in an interview Wednesday. “And you feel a loss of control.”

Others, however, believe the Broaddrick story shows that media behavior is no longer above scrutiny in the hurly-burly of daily news coverage. The decisions made by news organizations “are fair game for other media,” said Fox News Channel anchor Brit Hume, “and that . . . generates accountability.”

Indeed, media behavior--or dysfunction--is as much a part of the Broaddrick story as the sordid allegations themselves.

In a tortured route to broadcast, NBC correspondent Lisa Myers interviewed Broaddrick last month, but news officials said they had trouble corroborating aspects of the 21-year-old charge. Now 56, Broaddrick said she had been attending a nursing conference in Little Rock, Ark., and, after a brief meeting with Clinton in a coffee shop, he suggested they move to a quieter area, like her hotel room, where the alleged sexual assault took place. She never reported the incident to police, saying she didn’t think anyone would believe her. On “Dateline” she said she was coming forward because “I just couldn’t hold it in any longer. . . . My hatred for him is overwhelming.”

Accusation Called ‘Absolutely False’

President Clinton’s lawyer, David E. Kendall, has called the accusation “absolutely false.” Clinton on Wednesday declined to comment on it.

Although the Broaddrick story had been offered to several news organizations--including the Los Angeles Times--during Clinton’s 1992 presidential race, they did not pursue it at length. The Times found key obstacles: Sources for the story, who were openly partisan, conceded that Broaddrick then did not want to discuss the alleged incident with reporters. And the election was so near, even a well-reported story would have had the appearance of a last-minute smear.

Six years later, Broaddrick, who had been approached by lawyers for Paula Corbin Jones in her sexual harassment case against Clinton, signed an affidavit claiming the assault never took place. She recanted that story, however, and reinstated her original version when she was approached by investigators for independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr.

Although Starr’s agents took down a lengthy account of Broaddrick’s story, Starr decided not to make it part of the official impeachment inquiry. Investigators concluded that the story was old, difficult to prove and could not be connected to any pattern of wrongdoing in the White House. However, they included these materials in an appendix that was available to members of Congress.

While NBC reported the Broaddrick story, word leaked out, and a media chain reaction followed: First Matt Drudge and other online commentators, then talk radio, then all-news cable channels, began spreading the story. Many pressured NBC to air its interview, and some suggested, with no proof, that the network had been strong-armed by the White House.

On his radio talk show, Don Imus grilled NBC’s Washington Bureau Chief, Tim Russert, over the network’s inaction; guests on CNN’s “Reliable Sources” discussed the status of America’s best-covered TV interview that had not appeared on television. Even MSNBC, the network’s cable operation, was filled with chatter about the story.

As NBC maintained its official silence, the Wall Street Journal beat them on the story, publishing a sympathetic account of Broaddrick’s allegation last week on its conservative editorial pages. A day later, the Washington Post weighed in with a front-page story, crediting nine reporters, containing the paper’s own interviews with Broaddrick and the history of the case.

“We had valid reasons for covering this,” said Washington Post Editor Leonard Downie. “We knew that several Republican members of the House Judiciary Committee had tried to [sway] other Republicans into voting [for impeachment] after viewing the Broaddrick files. There was a political component we certainly didn’t want to ignore.”

Finally, the day before NBC announced it would broadcast its interview, the New York Times published a long account on an inside page. Keller said he and others conducted “a lengthy Socratic dialogue” on whether the story should be printed. Ultimately, the paper decided to publish the story because it had independently interviewed Broaddrick, and “it was a genuine media story, about as good an example I’ve seen of these weird new dynamics affecting the coverage.” In addition, he said, the paper’s readers undoubtedly were familiar with the allegations through other news sources, “and at some point you feel an obligation to help readers make sense of it.”

‘Cannot Be Proved Or Disproved Today’

The Los Angeles Times took yet another approach. “The Broaddrick story has been discussed intensely at the The Times and we did run a short wire services piece last Saturday after the president’s lawyer and his chief spokesman both denied the charges,” said Scott Kraft, national editor of The Times. “However, we decided not to pursue our own story because the allegation was never brought to the attention of authorities and almost certainly cannot be proved or disproved today.”

The one thread linking all these journalistic approaches is that no one has proved whether Broaddrick is telling the truth. But her allegation found its way into the media because of “the overwhelming competitive pressures of news organizations to run with a story that everybody else had reported on, even though they didn’t know whether it was true,” said Marvin Kalb, director of the Joan Shorenstein Center on Press and Politics at Harvard University.

“The lesson of all this,” he added, “is that it’s hard these days for responsible journalists to uphold standards. In the current marketplace, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to even try to do this. Even the best succumb to the worst.”