Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, January 26, 1992 TAG: 9201260065
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DAVID FIRESTONE NEWSDAY
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
SHOULD GOSSIP BECOME `NEWS'?
In 1987, when the Miami Herald broke the story of presidential candidate Gary Hart's infidelity, a Washington magazine editor was outraged, saying the story belonged in a supermarket tabloid."The Miami Herald editor who got the tip should have said, `I'm sorry, ma'am, you have the wrong number - you want the National Enquirer,' " wrote the New Republic's Hendrik Hertzberg at the time.
Last week, in an ironic twist on that remark, it actually was a supermarket tabloid - the Star, owned by the company that owns the Enquirer - that detailed allegations of adultery against Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton, a leading Democratic presidential candidate. But any of Hertzberg's hopes that such gossip would stay in the supermarkets were quickly dashed, because almost all mainstream newspapers and broadcast outlets decided the detailed charges and Clinton's denial were newsworthy enough to print.
"Four years ago, even the National Enquirer wouldn't have touched this Clinton story," said Hertzberg, the New Republic's senior editor, who is still angry. "But now the gossip standard of news is in the saddle."
Editors and reporters around the country disagreed with the assessment that they had sunk to the Star's level. But several acknowledged that publishing a story that had been purchased by the Star from an alleged lover of Clinton was an extremely unpalatable news decision.
"The fact that this story comes from the Star deeply, deeply undercuts its credibility," said Bob Boyd, chief Washington correspondent for Knight-Ridder newspapers, which include the Miami Herald. "We thought a lot about it . . . and finally decided not to touch it, because we couldn't prove it ourselves."
At Newsday, which ran a headline about the story on the front page, Editor Anthony Marro said there was considerable debate over how to treat the story.
"Of course it gave us pause to run a story from the Star, great pause," he said. "But the reason for the prominent play was not so much the allegation itself, but the effect it was having on the campaign. On the basis of what our reporters told us, this was causing a significant amount of turmoil in the campaign."
Many of the country's metropolitan papers ran the story, but on an inside page, usually among other political news.
The Roanoke Times & World-News ran a story on an inside page Jan. 18 about an Arkansas Republican giving free legal advice to a man who was spreading similar allegations against Clinton, but ran no story about the Star's article.
The fact that so many papers treated the Star story as legitimate news at all disturbed several press critics, who suggested the mainstream media were allowing the supermarket tabs to do their dirty work, all the while waiting to spread the same gossip under the guise of a political story or a media analysis.
"You can track these stories like some kind of strange computer game," said Ellen Goodman, the Boston Globe columnist. "First somebody throws something in a sleazy magazine. Then we report that something was printed in that terribly sleazy magazine. Then we do the next respectable story of whether the media should have done it."
Everette Dennis, executive director of the Freedom Forum Media Studies Center at Columbia University, said the press couldn't afford to ignore the gossip magazines because they might occasionally have a legitimate tip.
"But just to run the stories without checking them out yourself is to let the supermarket tabloids set the agenda," he said. Dennis and other media watchers said the mixture of gossip and politics has grown more potent in the 4 1/2 years since Gary Hart's fall. Along with the rise of "tabloid-TV" shows, the mainstream press has grown far more interested in gossip at the same time as the supermarket tabs have decided that politics is one of their legitimate spheres of influence.
Before 1987, Dennis said, the supermarket papers had little interest in politics, which was considered boring. Then the National Enquirer received a tremendous amount of publicity for publishing the photo of Hart with Donna Rice aboard the yacht Monkey Business, and the race was on.
Keywords:
POLITICS