The Project for Excellence in Journalism
Internet Journalism and the
Clinton-Lewinsky
Investigation
The Internet, as it is known and used today, took
years to evolve. Similar to the development of radio and television, the Internet
first caught on in technologically savvy circles. Slowly it made its way into a form of communication among the
general public. In 1995 only 14 percent
of the public went online, according to a public opinion survey by the Pew
Center for the People and the Press. By
1997 that number had risen to 37 percent, but it was not until the summer of
1999 that half of those questioned reported that they used the Internet.
A
pivotal moment in the Internet’s coming of age was an eight-month investigation
of the President of the United States during 1998. The investigation, led by Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr,
examined whether President Clinton had had a sexual affair with a 24-year-old
White House intern named Monica Lewinsky and had lied about it under oath to a
federal grand jury. The highly
political scandal ended in impeachment for the president, though not conviction
or removal from office. But, more
important for journalism, it forced the traditional media to overhaul their
ways of presenting news online in order to meet the needs and demands of
Internet users.
“The
first generation of Web journalism was bland, irrelevant, and generally
clueless,” says Jon Katz, an online columnist and new media scholar at the
Freedom Forum. “Nobody paid much
attention to it. Then came the Clinton
scandal and the Starr report, and everything changed.”
“It
was the first time.” he says, “that official Washington, journalism, and the
Internet bumped into one another nose to nose.”
The
Internet was used to break the news of the scandal, to voice new allegations,
and to release in its entirety Starr’s final report on his investigation. It provided the first detailed look at the
differences in character between the Internet and the traditional broadcast and
print media. It raises such questions as these for journalism:
The
Internet may help journalists give the news faster and more in-depth, but does
it make it more difficult to be accurate and fair?
How
can journalists approach this medium in a way that upholds these journalistic
principles?
This
case examines three specific instances in the scandal:
1. Reports based on shaky sourcing in the Wall
Street Journal and the Dallas Morning News that the president and the intern
had been seen together in a compromising situation.
2. The final report issued by investigator
Kenneth Starr and widely carried in full on the web.
3. The
breaking of the story by Matt Drudge through his online newsletter.
These
events consider the issues of sourcing, verification, timing and public
interest in the then-new age of Internet reporting.
Shortly
after midnight, in the early hours of January 17, Tripp’s lawyer arrived at the
Washington offices of Newsweek with two tape recordings. The tapes had been made by Tripp of conversations
she had had with Lewinsky.
Tripp and Lewinsky both had been transferred from
the White House to the Pentagon, where they got acquainted. After hearing the tapes, evaluating what
they had and weighing Starr’s entreaties that they wait a week, Newsweek’s
editors decided against running the story—partly in exchange for a promise that
Starr’s office would give them a complete account for the following week’s
edition.
About
five hours after Newsweek decided to hold off, Matt Drudge—a one-man Internet
gossip and news agency—was tipped off about the piece and he reported it,
without verifying the facts. His story
appeared on his Drudge Report web site, in an e-mail alert sent to 85,000
newsletter subscribers, and later in his column on America Online (AOL). Here is his report:
DRUDGE
REPORT By January 1998, Newsweek correspondent Michael Isikoff had spent months
pursuing tips and rumors about sexual activities of the President of the United
States. He had covered the suit in Arkansas brought by Paula Corwin Jones, who
accused Bill Clinton of propositioning her in a Little Rock hotel when he was
governor. He had also followed the
investigation into Clinton’s activities in Arkansas by Kenneth Starr. Now, back in Washington and with the help of
Linda Tripp, who formerly worked in the White House, and her literary agent
friend, Lucianne Goldberg, he had come up with a detailed story about Bill
Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky.
Web Posted: 01/17/98 21:32:02 PST—
HOUSE INTERN BLOCKBUSTER REPORT:
23-YEAR OLD, FORMER WHITE HOUSE
INTERN, SEX RELATIONSHIP WITH
PRESIDENT
**World Exclusive**
**Must Credit the DRUDGE REPORT**
At the last minute, at 6 p.m. on Saturday evening, NEWSWEEK
magazine killed a story that was destined to shake official Washington to its
foundation: A White House intern carried on a sexual affair with the President
of the United States!
The DRUDGE REPORT has learned that tapes of intimate phone
conversations exist.
The relationship between the president and the young woman
became strained when the president believed that the young woman was bragging
about the affair to others.
NEWSWEEK and Isikoff were planning to name the The DRUDGE
REPORT has learned that reporter Michael Isikoff developed the story of his
career, only to have it spiked by top NEWSWEEK suits hours before publication.
A young woman, 23, sexually involved with the love of her life, the President
of the United States, since she was a 21-year-old intern at the White House. She was a frequent visitor to a small study
just off the Oval Office where she claims to have indulged the president’s
sexual preference. Reports of the relationship spread in White House quarters
and she was moved to a job at the Pentagon, where she worked until last month.
The young intern wrote long love letters to President
Clinton, which she delivered through a delivery service. She was a frequent
visitor at the White House after midnight, where she checked in the WAVE logs
as visiting a secretary named Betty Curry, 57.
Word of the story’s impeding release caused blind chaos in media
circles;
TIME magazine spent Saturday scrambling for its own version
of the story, the DRUDGE REPORT has learned. The NEW YORK POST on Sunday was
set to front the young intern’s affair, but was forced to fall back on the
dated ABC NEWS Kathleen Willey break.
The story was set to break just hours after President
Clinton testified in the Paula Jones sexual harassment case.
Ironically, several years ago, it was Isikoff that found
himself in a shouting match with editors who were refusing to publish even a
portion of his meticulously researched investigative report that was to break
Paula Jones. Isikoff worked for the
WASHINGTON POST at the time, and left shortly after the incident to build them
for the paper’s sister magazine, NEWSWEEK.
Michael Isikoff was not available for comment late Saturday. NEWSWEEK was on voice mail.
The White House was busy checking the DRUDGE REPORT for
details.
Drudge
had earlier broken an Isikoff story being held by Newsweek about a White House
volunteer, Kathleen Willey, who said Clinton had fondled her. That story had
not attracted much attention, but this one about a White House intern set off
intense journalistic competition.
The
next morning, Drudge’s report was mentioned by conservative commentator Bill
Kristol on ABC’s This Week with Sam Donaldson and Cokie Roberts. By Monday,
January 19, the Washington bureaus of the major news organizations knew about
the report. Drudge’s e-mail dispatch had been seen by a number of influential
news managers who subscribed to it, such as Doyle McManus, Washington bureau
chief of the Los Angeles Times. Journalists
of all stripes were chasing the story.
While
many mainstream news reporters found the sexual underpinnings of the episode
distasteful, there was little disagreement that it was a legitimate news story. The Office of the Independent Counsel was
investigating whether the president had obstructed justice by encouraging
Monica Lewinsky to lie under oath about their relationship. The fact that the oath was taken for a
deposition in a separate sexual harassment case against Clinton made it no less
newsworthy.
“When
you use the words president, sex, and intern in the same sentence, you’re going
to get everyone’s attention,” says Leah Gentry, director of new media for the
Los Angeles Times. “For an online
journalist, the story was a lot of fun to work on because it had constantly
breaking developments, lots of web storytelling challenges, opportunities for
multimedia, and high reader interest. All
the lights were green. If stories were
holidays, this story was Christmas.”
The
public airing of the charges dimmed the independent counsel’s hope of eliciting
tape-recorded corroboration of the allegations, and suddenly Starr and his
staff made themselves more accessible to journalists. Newsweek had lost its scoop.
In
the early evening of Tuesday, January 20, Dave Willman, the investigative
reporter at the Los Angeles Times covering Whitewater, walked into the office
of his boss, McManus.
Willman told the bureau chief that Starr just had
his mandate broadened to look into allegations of the affair and whether
Clinton had told Lewinsky to lie and commit perjury. Times reporters immediately went to work on the story and found
that they had heavy competition. “The
Washington Post had the story the same evening, ABC News had the story the same
evening,” McManus says. “So there was
clearly a lot of leakage.”
Late
Tuesday night, the story hit the mainstream media. In its early edition, the Washington Post announced in a
four-column headline across the front page:
CLINTON
ACCUSED OF URGING AIDE TO LIE;
STARR
PROBES WHETHER PRESIDENT TOLD WOMAN TO DENY ALLEGED AFFAIR TO JONES’S LAWYERS.
The article, by Susan Schmidt, who had been working
the same territory as Isikoff, was attributed to “sources close to the
investigation.” Minutes after midnight,
ABC
News broadcast a story recapping the Post story on
its radio network. ABC’s Jackie Judd had
also covering the Arkansas angles along with Schmidt and Isikoff. And the Los Angeles Times also broke the
story in its Wednesday edition with a front-page story headlined,
STARR
EXAMINES CLINTON LINK TO FEMALE INTERN.
None
of these stories named a single source.
A
media feeding frenzy followed public disclosure of Starr’s investigation. Revelation piled upon revelation, each more
sensational than the one before. Journalists
scrambled to confirm them but often ran them with only anonymous sourcing. During just the first week, various
newspapers and networks reported the following, most of which proved false in
the end:
That
White House staff members once saw Clinton and Lewinsky in an intimate
encounter.
That
the two had engaged in phone sex.
That
Clinton had left a message on Lewinsky’s answering machine.
That
Clinton may have had sex with a second White House intern.
That
Clinton said he does not consider oral sex to be adultery.
That
he claimed to have had sex with “hundreds” of women.
That
in his sealed deposition he admitted under oath to having an affair with
another woman, Gennifer Flowers.
That
he might have had an affair with a distant cousin.
That
he had had an affair with the widow of a former ambassador to Switzerland who
been exhumed from Arlington National Cemetery and buried in another site when
it was discovered that he had fabricated his military record.
On
top of the leaks came declarations from journalists that Clinton would be
forced from office. Four days after the story broke, the prospect of
impeachment or resignation was a major topic of discussion on the Sunday talk
shows. Sam Donaldson, ABC’s White House correspondent, asserted on This Week
with Sam and Cokie:
“Mr.
Clinton, if he’s not telling the truth and the evidence shows that, will
resign, perhaps this week.”
The
public disagreed. A Washington Post poll taken ten days after the story broke
found that 56 percent of those surveyed believed the news media were treating
Clinton unfairly, and 74 percent said the media were giving the story “too much
attention.” A Freedom Forum poll found
that the top two adjectives used by Americans to describe the coverage of the
story were “excessive” and “embarrassing.”
But the potential for impeachment and the constant stream of rumors and
allegations hung like carrots in front of journalists.
Nearly
all news organizations had established home pages on the web by this time, but
few were taking advantage of the online medium’s inherent advantages of
immediacy, interactivity and depth. The vast majority of newspapers updated
their sites once a day, following the print cycle, preventing the web site from
“scooping” the newspaper. Most news
sites relied almost exclusively on “shovelware”— content that had the twin
disadvantages of being written for a different medium (print) and being
untimely, i.e., yesterday’s news. Breaking
news, if covered at all, was left to a wire service feed on the site. Interactivity was a novelty. Some Internet news sites associated with
television, such as CNN Interactive and MSNBC, were experimenting with
multimedia, but most news sites used video and audio sparingly or not at all. For the most part, users came, they clicked,
they yawned. It seemed that newspapers
considered the web a reluctant obligation rather than the future of their
business.
Perhaps
inspired by competition to get the story first—or even by Drudge’s wide
readership—many news organizations tried to build their online presence during
the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal. The
immediate delivery of information on the web suddenly caught on as a way not
only of offering background or analysis but of breaking news to the public.
This case study looks closely at two early incidents in the coverage: A report
in the Dallas Morning News, and a report in the Wall Street Journal, each of
which could have dealt a crippling political blow to Clinton’s presidency.
Eye
of the storm: Dallas Morning News The publication that found itself most
squarely in the eye of the hurricane during early press coverage of the Clinton-Lewinsky
matter, was the Dallas Morning News.
On
Sunday, January 25, ABC News reported on This Week that Starr was looking into
claims that in the spring of 1996 the president and Lewinsky had been “caught
in an intimate encounter” by either Secret Service agents or White House
staffers, according to “several sources.”
The following day, David Jackson, a veteran member of the Dallas Morning
News Washington bureau, received a tip from a source who put more meat and
bones on the story. The source, a well-connected Washington lawyer, said he had
knowledge that a federal employee had seen Clinton and Lewinsky in a
“compromising situation” in the White House and had agreed to testify as a
government witness. The report, if
true, dramatically escalated the stakes for the president.
Later
Monday, the News spoke with the source again and amended the story to say that
Starr’s staff had spoken with a Secret Service agent, a level of detail that
added gravity to the charge. The
paper’s top editor, Ralph Langer, says the source confirmed the story after it
was read to him.
But
a News official would later say the source’s law partner called Jackson at 5
p.m. to warn the paper off the story. Bureau
chief Carl Leubsdorf acknowledged that he learned of the call around midnight
Washington time but minimized the reservations expressed by the law partner.
At
a meeting of senior editors early that evening, the story was discussed at
length. John Cranfill, managing
director of the dallasnews.com web site, recalls he expressed doubts about the
story’s accuracy. “I was skeptical of
the story. It raised chill bumps on my
arms. I lobbied to wait on the story. But the others felt we had it solid, and the
decision was made to run it in the first edition.” The story was then sent out to the Associated Press and Knight
Ridder wires and posted on the paper’s web site.
On
Monday night, the paper ran in its bulldog edition (which hit the streets that
night but carried the next day’s date) and on its web site a story with this
lead:
“Independent
Counsel Kenneth Starr’s staff has spoken with a Secret Service agent who is
prepared to testify that he saw President Clinton and Monica Lewinsky in a
compromising situation in the White House, sources said Monday.”
Soon,
all hell broke loose. Wire services
sent the story worldwide. Cable networks, radio shows and local TV newscasts
led with the report. Larry King
interrupted his program to read the story live. Ted Koppel led Nightline with
the news. The story was so explosive
that the White House called Nightline and denied the story on the air.
‘There’s
a problem with the story’ By the end of Nightline the original source called
the paper and backed off his claim, saying, “I don’t think I really said what
you’re reporting.” (Both Langer and Cranfill suggest that White House pressure
led to the source’s turnabout, but journalists reconstructing the piece for the
Dallas Observer conclude it’s more likely that one of Starr’s staff members
called the source to retract the claim—because it wasn’t true.) A flurry of phone calls ensued.
Recalls Cranfill: “At 11:30 p.m. I got a call from
the national editor, who said, ‘There’s a problem with the story, Ralph Langer
says to take it off the site.’ We put
up an explanation that the source had changed his statement.”
Langer
pulled the story out of Tuesday’s second edition. The News later substituted a story that said in part, “The source
for the story, a longtime Washington lawyer familiar with the case, later said
the information provided for Tuesday’s report was inaccurate.”
The
Associated Press carried the newspaper’s report on the wire for nearly four
hours that night before filing a “bulletin kill” at 1:02 a.m.
Tuesday. Darrell Christian, AP managing editor, said
the news service tries to be cautious about repeating allegations supported
only by unidentified sources. He said
he had no reason to doubt the Dallas paper’s account, based on its trustworthy
track record. “We take into account the
news organization, the nature of the report, and the qualifications they give
to the report,” he says. “It’s hard to
fault anyone for picking up that report. It passed the smell test.”
Just
a few hours passed between the Morning News story and its retraction, but that
was more than enough time for the news to circle the globe. Dozens of newspapers, including the
Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, and Chicago Tribune,
carried the report the next day. (The
New York Post’s front page headline blared: “I SAW THEM DO IT”; the New York
Daily News said: “CAUGHT IN THE ACT.”) The
papers were then forced to publish an account of the Morning News’s
quasi-retraction the next day.
Yet
a third version of the story appeared on the Morning News web site late Tuesday
and in its print edition the next day. This
time, the paper partly reasserted its original claim—now seemingly based on
multiple sources—saying that the first story was “essentially correct.”
Quoting two sources, the paper said “one or more
witnesses” had seen Clinton and Lewinsky in “an ambiguous incident” rather than
“a compromising situation.” It also
said an “intermediary for one or more witnesses”—and not a Secret Service
agent—had “talked with independent counsel Kenneth Starr’s office about
possible cooperation.”
Later,
on Wednesday, the newspaper assembled more than 200 editorial employees in a
ballroom of the Hyatt Regency Hotel to discuss the fiasco. Editor Ralph Langer fielded questions from
staffers with the aid of a wireless microphone while Carl Leubsdorf, the
paper’s longtime Washington bureau chief, chimed in from a speakerphone. Langer told the employees that the News had
unwittingly relied on only one source to publish its original story, violating
the paper’s two-source standard.
Senior editors mistakenly believed a second source
existed because of a “miscommunication” between Dallas and the Washington
bureau. Pundits, politicians and press
critics immediately pounced upon the paper’s retraction. The New York Times devoted a story to the
debacle under the headline, “Retracting a Retraction, Self-Defense and a
Revelation.” Reporter Janny Scott
wrote: “The Dallas Morning News, the newspaper that made news by becoming the
first news gathering organization to officially retract a front-page story on
the White House sex scandal, went itself one better yesterday and retracted the
retraction. Sort of.”
The
Wall Street Journal’s revisions
About
three weeks after the story first broke, a Wall Street Journal reporter
approached Joe Lockhart, the White House deputy press secretary, shortly before
4 p.m. on February 4, according to Lockhart.
The reporter was asking for a reaction to accusations that a White House
steward had once seen Clinton and Lewinsky alone in a study next to the Oval
Office. The reporter said he needed the
information quickly because the paper planned to publish the story on its web
site. Lockhart said he and the reporter
agreed that Lockhart would get back to the reporter within 30 minutes unless
the reporter paged him to say he had less time. A few minutes later, the reporter paged him to say the story had
already gone up on the Wall Street Journal online site.
The
Journal’s online story reported that Bayani Nelvis, a White House steward, had
testified before Starr’s grand jury that he had seen Clinton and Lewinsky alone
together. The story claimed the steward
“found and disposed of tissues with lipstick and other stains following a
meeting between Mr. Clinton and Ms. Lewinsky,” and that he had recounted the
episode to the Secret Service because he was “personally offended” by it. The report was attributed to “two
individuals familiar with” the steward’s testimony. Within minutes after the story was posted, the Journal’s
Washington bureau chief, Alan Murray, appeared on the cable news channel CNBC—the
Journal’s new television partner—discussing the scoop. His remarks were later picked up by MSNBC
and posted on the MSNBC web site.
Less
than 90 minutes after the Journal first posted the story, Nelvis’s attorney
issued a statement calling the report “absolutely false and irresponsible.” Later that afternoon, the Washington Post
and other news organizations sought to verify the original allegations, but the
Post said its sources close to the grand jury strongly denied that Nelvis had
given any such testimony.
At
6:40 p.m., the Journal posted a revised version of the story in which it added
the strong denials from the steward’s lawyer, who had refused to comment when
the Journal was preparing its initial report.
The softened story contained a second change as well: The steward
reportedly spoke to Secret Service personnel, and not necessarily the grand
jury, about what he had seen. Meantime,
both the original report and revised version had flashed to news outlets across
the country.
Brian Duffy, who shared a byline on the story,
justified the online publication this way: “We heard footsteps from at least
one other news organization and just didn’t think it was going to hold in this
crazy cycle we’re in.” The following
morning, February 5, yet another version appeared in the Journal, this time in
the print edition. The story, with a
few small modifications, ran on page A24 under the headline, “Controversy
Erupts Over Testimony to Grand Jury by White House Steward.” Hours later, at his daily press briefing,
Lockhart noted that in its haste to post the story, the Journal had not waited
for a response from the White House. “The
normal rules of checking or getting a response to a story seem to have given
way to the technology of the Internet and the competitive pressure of getting
it first,” he said. “I understand the
competitive pressure that everybody is under. But I do think it’s a significant
lowering of standards when getting it first supersedes getting it right.”
Richard
Tofel, a spokesman for the Journal, denied the White House’s assertion of
declining journalistic standards and said the newspaper had merely updated a
breaking news story, a standard practice for news organizations. “In the wire
service business, this happens all the time,” Tofel said. Paul Steiger, the paper’s managing editor,
released a statement saying, “We stand by our account of what Mr. Nelvis told
the Secret Service.” He said the
Journal posted the story when the editors “felt it was ready.” The Journal didn’t wait for a response
because the paper felt the White House had made it clear it wouldn’t answer
questions about the case.
On
Monday, February 9, the Journal reported that, contrary to its earlier story,
the steward had not told the grand jury he had seen Clinton and Lewinsky alone.
In fact, far from seeing something, Nelvis turns out never to have seen the two
alone and had testified to that before the grand jury. “We deeply regret our
erroneous report of Mr. Nelvis’s testimony,” the Journal quoted Steiger as
saying.
During
the week, while several wire services filed reports about the Journal story and
its later retractions, the Associated Press didn’t touch it. Darrell Christian, the managing editor who
had earlier picked up the Dallas Morning News story, said this time “we went to
our own sources and tried to check it out and were pretty much convinced that
there were enough doubts about the accuracy of the report that we would not go
with it.”
As it turned out, no eyewitness to an intimate act
by Clinton and Lewinsky has ever come
forward. Supporting documents to the Starr report
show that White House steward, Bayani Nelvis, had complained to the Secret
Service about having to collect towels that had lipstick on them. This is as close as any evidence comes to
there being a witness. The Starr
report, in the end, was mute on the subject.
Nearly
two years later, it is apparent in the Dallas Morning News newsroom that the
scars from the episode remain. “The
conventional wisdom is that the Dallas Morning News really screwed up,” John
Cranfill says, a bit brusquely. “But it
was the witness who changed his story.
During those early weeks there was a lot of rumor and innuendo flying
around, and a lot of news organizations were put in the position of trying to
sort out the truth. We had sources
swearing to us up and down that certain events happened, and it turned out it
wasn’t true. There was a lot of
pressure to put the next revelation up without as much confirmation as we
needed.”
While
it may sound like a convincing argument to go slow on a big story and not worry
about scooping the competition, Cranfill doesn’t see it that way. “News
coverage is always sloppy. You don’t have the luxury of being able to pore over
the documented facts like a historian and say, ‘Here’s what really happened.’ When you’re in the heat of the moment,
you’re at the mercy of what people who step forward tell you. We’re especially vulnerable on the web.”
Cranfill,
who became the web site’s news projects editor in 1999, adds: “Most Internet-based
breaking news stories advance faster than television, much faster than
newspapers and at least as fast as radio.
Anyone who has had any experience reading wire service bulletins learns
quickly that the initial reports on the wire are partly right and partly wrong,
and only time will tell which is which.
Now, if you’re running a news web site, are you going to sit on what
you’ve got, or are you going to report it?
If you hold off, I’ll guarantee you people will pick up the phone and
ask us why we’re not publishing the news.”
During
press coverage of such past scandals as Watergate in 1974 or Iran-Contra in
1987, perhaps the biggest challenge facing journalists involved news
gathering—teasing out enough information from reluctant sources for a solid
story. In the Clinton sex scandal,
information flowed like a flooding river.
As a result of the Internet, it was everywhere, but much of it was murky
or polluted. One organization sometimes
cited another organization as its source, or linked to another organization’s
web site story.
Once something made it into the public airways, it
was hard to slow it down. A study commissioned
by the Committee of Concerned Journalists found that in the early stages of the
Starr investigation, 21 percent of the reporting was based on anonymous sources
and almost half of those stories were based on one source only. Sandy Grady, Washington columnist for the
Philadelphia Daily News, dubbed the early coverage “Monica Meltdown Week.” He wrote:
“This
was the worst performance by the American press my eyes and ears witnessed
since I began covering Washington in 1974.
I’ve never seen so many stories flying through the ether disconnected
from sources, stories flatly wrong, over-dramatized hype, hypothesis disguised
as fact and toxic stuff circulating through the Internet, cable and mainline
press.”
The
real challenge came in filtering out fact from rumor. In particular:
News
organizations covering the story first hand had to determine the reliability of
the information obtained. Some sources had politically tinged motives—many
participants had Republican ties and had a strong, visceral hatred of President
Clinton dating back to the outset of his 1992 presidential campaign and before. Some sources in the independent counsel’s
office were using the press by selectively leaking information to gain tactical
advantage with reluctant witnesses like Lewinsky. Reporters and editors worked out these calls based on their
experiences, news judgment and gut feelings.
News
organizations, especially those from small and medium-size markets, had to wade
through the digital data-stream pouring through the newsroom from outside
channels each day to decide what to publish.
Even established news providers like the Wall Street Journal and Dallas
Morning News were stumbling, while newcomers like cyber-columnist Drudge seemed
to be wired to some knowledgeable—if anonymous—sources.
In
this story, editors had an especially difficult time determining what was fit
to print. They were often troubled by
the endless leaks and the constant parade of unidentified sources, particularly
when they had to rely on the judgments of other news organizations.
Dan
Berko, online content editor for the 35,000-circulation Daily Camera of
Boulder, Colorado, recalls: “We didn’t have correspondents in Washington, we
didn’t have sources in Kenneth Starr’s office, we didn’t know anything first
hand. We were somewhat at the mercy of
the big news outfits and the wire services.
We trusted them to get it right, and I’m not sure they always got it
right. But if we limited our coverage,
were we doing a disservice to our readers?”
Large
news organizations also wrestled with the sourcing problem. The editors at the New York Times were
particularly wary of passing along reports based on unidentified sources. At one point the Times Washington bureau had
four hearsay sources asserting there was indeed a witness to an intimate
encounter between Clinton and Lewinsky. Executive Editor Joseph Lelyveld says
the Times came close to running a story, but couldn’t nail down the account to
its editors’ satisfaction. “We got
quite a coherent story from one person, and fragments supported by others. Then we got some very stiff denials of key
elements from people said to be involved. In the end, it just didn’t seem good
enough. It’s easy to slip up and make
mistakes.
It takes a lot of self-discipline to keep asking the
question: ‘How do we know this?’ We’ve
all heard the same stuff. We’re trying
very hard to anchor what we put in the paper on our own reporting, but it’s a
difficult standard. We’re all swimming
in the same murky sea.”
Eric Owles, national producer for the New York Times
on the Web, says it would have been easy to publish the allegations by
attributing them to another news source, such as the Dallas paper. But he says the paper’s web editors decided
early on not to report any new development unless they had independently
confirmed the report with the paper’s Washington bureau. “While the Starr
investigation put new media in the spotlight,” Owles says, “we didn’t want the
pressure of 24-hour news to be used as an excuse to rush stories into print on
the basis of unverified, unnamed sources.”
Other
media did the same. A wire editor at
CNN was responsible for reconciling conflicting information on the scandal that
came in from outside news providers. The
Los Angeles Times sought to stick to its two-source rule and assigned a copy
editor to see that stories were acceptably sourced before they appeared in the
paper or on the web site. As a result, some big stories, such as the initial
reports about the now-famous stained blue dress worn by Lewinsky during one
encounter, did not appear.
On
September 9, 1998, the House of Representatives received special prosecutor
Starr’s report. The report—formally
titled “Referral From Independent Counsel Kenneth W. Starr in Conformity With
the Requirements of Title 28, United States Code, Section 595©”—was a document
without precedence in U.S. history. It
contained graphic accounts of Clinton’s sexual affair with Lewinsky and alleged
that the president had committed perjury, obstructed justice, tampered with
witnesses and abused his constitutional powers. The report laid the foundation for Clinton’s impeachment by the House
along party lines in December 1998; he was acquitted in his Senate trial two
months later. Two days after it got the
report, the House voted to release it—on the Internet—and for one improbable,
and historical, afternoon and evening, the Net had the spotlight all to itself.
In
the online melee that ensued, journalists scrambled to get a copy—but so did
millions of ordinary Americans. Congress
had made no provisions to handle the crush of traffic at the three official
government web sites posting the report. Its servers were hopelessly jammed. To compound the problem, legislative techies
had posted the 445-page report in a clunky format that required users to
download the entire document without being able to peek at its contents.
At
2:45 p.m., September 11, CNN.com became the first news site to post the report,
beating the competition by 15 minutes because of “good connections inside the
Capitol,” says Scott Woelfel, general manager and editor in chief of CNN
Interactive. By mid-afternoon, the
free-for-all was in full swing. CNN.com’s
front page was getting 300,000 hits per minute. MSNBC reported 1.94 million visitors that day, a record. Across the entire web, traffic was up 175
percent over the previous day. All
told, 20 million Americans read parts of the report online within 48 hours of
its release.
The
release of the Starr report was widely seen as the single most important event
in the history of the Internet up to that point. “The real milestone of the Starr report,” Woelfel observes, “was
that if you weren’t on the Net, you felt like you were missing part of the
story.”
Journalists
new to the Internet are sometimes surprised by how much nuts-and-bolts
technical tinkering goes on in new media newsrooms, and this was never truer
than on this day. At the Los Angeles
Times, the entertainment staff joined the entire new media department in
cutting and pasting text documents into smaller file sizes to enable users to
scan through web-friendly HTML pages. CNN
placed the report on an internal server so TV correspondents could access it
immediately while sitting at computer terminals. And at the Daily Camera in Boulder, Colorado, the 23-year-old
Berko went to heroic lengths—working 27 straight hours—to download the report
from an FTP server, upload it to the local site and then send it on to
Scripps-Howard’s corporate site.
Many
came to the same conclusion as an editor at the Providence Journal: “It’s clear
to us that many readers want to get their hands on the raw data as opposed to
information that has been filtered through editors and reporters. These are people who want to make their own
judgment, and giving them the actual report is the only way to do that.”
Certainly,
the Starr report’s availability on the Internet changed the dynamic of the
deliberations inside newsrooms. Some
decided to pass on the report because of its wide availability elsewhere. Others saw posting the full report on the
news publication’s web site as a civic responsibility. The fact that users proactively had to
access the report on the web, rather than having it enter their living rooms
through the airwaves or a family newspaper, was a decisive factor for them.
A
nationwide survey of daily newspaper editors by Presstime, the magazine of the
American Newspaper Publishers’ Association, found three days after the report’s
release that:
17
percent published the full report in print;
70
percent ran excerpts;
64
percent ran the full text online, and these sites saw an average 80 percent
increase in traffic.
Once
online news publications had a copy of the report in hand and crafted an
appropriate warning about its explicit content, they got down to the business
of making it web-friendly. “It’s not
enough to just put up a 445-page document and say, ‘Here it is, everyone’,”
says CNN’s Woelfel. “Our online staff had to figure out how to tame this
multi-tentacled creature.” News
organizations faced a number of decisions:
How
to handle the explicit language and descriptions of lascivious conduct described
in the report.
Whether
to print excerpts or the full text of the report.
Whether
to publish it online in the same format as it was available on the Internet.
Whether
the report’s contents should be filtered by the traditional news role of
“gatekeepers.”
While
dozens of non-news sites, ranging from search engines like Lycos to financial
services sites like Motley Fool, also made the report available online, some
news sites provided a full complement of web tools in dissecting the report.
At
the Boulder Daily Camera web site, the Starr report was wrapped into the site’s
“Clinton in Crisis” package, including an archive of past stories relating to
the scandal and a biographical cast of characters that sketched out the major
players and their role in the affair.
The Dallas Morning News web site added the Starr report to its ongoing
scandal package. The paper’s
dallasnews.com gave the report context by assembling in one place the scores of
staff-written stories, press conference transcripts, biographical sketches,
background profiles, a slide show that contained photographs of all the key
players, video footage, reader forums, e-mail addresses of members of Congress
and links to other sites. “I don’t know
of anything written or said or photographed about this event that was not up on
our site,” says online editor Cranfill.
At latimes.com, the release of the Starr report gave
editors an opportunity to cover multiple elements of the story and allow
readers to engage in “personal storytelling,” as New Media Director Leah Gentry
likes to call it. “The personal nature
of the web allows you to move through information at your own pace, access the
material at multiple entry points, and seek out the elements you’re most
interested in. The web is a non-linear
experience, and no two people move through the web the same way.”
Latimes.com
interwove the Starr report with the deep content of its “Clinton Under Fire”
package: an interactive time-line of the major events, including video of the
major participants; an archive of staff-written articles, columns and op-ed
commentaries on the Clinton-Lewinsky matter; videotaped testimony and
transcripts of testimony dating back to the Whitewater affair; e-mail addresses
of members of Congress (which thousands of readers made use of); and lively
discussion forums, which were now closely monitored because of a death threat
made against the president on the “Clinton Under Fire” bulletin board on
February 27, 1998. (The FBI and Secret Service were alerted and tracked down
the culprit.) On the day of the
report’s release, the newspaper Los Angeles Times broke with tradition when its
Washington bureau filed midday off-cycle news stories to its online site. The online reports included a reporter’s
notebook, a Q&A on the Starr report, and another first for the site:
several audio filings throughout the day in which an online editor interviewed
various Times political reporters.
At
CNN.com, a team of four staff members worked non-stop over three days to index
the report and cross-reference the document with links from participants’ names
to thumbnail sketches. Reporters from CNN and Time magazine’s joint AllPolitics
team filed breaking news stories with congressional, White House and public
reaction. Links were added from both
the report and supporting materials to the site’s “Investigating the President”
package, including photos of key players; a video of Clinton’s admission of an
affair; transcripts of interviews, press conferences and remarks by
congressional leaders; lively discussion forum postings; polls; editorial
cartoons, and dozens of online stories, archived by month. A search engine allowed users to browse the
Starr report by table of contents, name, date or keyword. The resulting package set the standard for
how to treat primary source material on the web.
The
Starr report raised questions about what content is suitable for family
newspapers and live broadcasts. Many
news organizations resolved this dilemma by heavily editing its contents in
print and on air and then making the entire report available on their web sites
along with prominent warnings about the report’s graphic content.
Some
of the oddest moments in the media’s coverage of the Starr investigation came
when broadcast journalists read excerpts of the report live on the air. CBS News correspondent Bob Schieffer
reported the president and Lewinsky had engaged in “a sex act of a kind,” and
he edited himself as he thumbed through the report. CNN correspondent Candy Crawford, reporting live in front of an
office computer, warned viewers that the report was explicit and then read
excerpts off the Internet that described various sex acts.
“When
you had broadcast journalists sitting down at a computer screen and showing the
viewer passages from the report on the Web, it demonstrated vividly how
completely reliant television journalists were on the web for this story,” says
James Naughton, president of the Poynter Institute, a media think tank.
A
role for analysis, synthesis and context. On the day the Starr report swooped into cyberspace, news sites
saw their online usage surge. A poll by the Pew Research Center for the People
and the Press found that the public turned to Internet sites in large numbers
as a news source during the scandal. Journalists
should be heartened by the knowledge that online users gravitated to the major
national news sites: MSNBC, CNN Interactive, USAToday Online, nytimes.com,
washingtonpost.com.
But
they should not be smug or complacent about their role in cyberspace, for
millions of users accessed the report directly—without the filter of the news
media. As late as 1995, such a document
could have been conveyed to the public only by journalists. Now it was
instantly available to anyone with an Internet connection to read, dissect,
forward to others, debate in an online forum, or print out and share with
friends and neighbors.
Online
columnist Katz says he received 25 or 30 copies of the report that people had
e-mailed to him within a span of five minutes.
“This was the first time in American history that millions of citizens
were given access to a critical document at the same time as their elected
representatives and the news media,” he says.
“People reached their own conclusions about the document fairly quickly,
without the Washington press corps, the pundits and Beltway politicians telling
us what to think. People in positions
of power have been rattled by the Net because they sense they’re losing control
over the civic agenda. The Net spreads the agenda-setting around.”
Still,
though millions perused the report online, few read the full 445-page document. Fewer still read the hundreds of pages of
supporting materials. Does this mean
there still a need for journalists to divine the significance of news and put
events into perspective? Or can people
get what they want for themselves? Is
there no longer a need for the work the Los Angeles Times produced for its
paper and later posted on its web site—a comprehensive look at the Starr
report’s most significant findings, congressional reaction, local public
sentiment, a look at how the media covered the report on television, a story on
how to answer children’s questions about the scandal, a business story on the
stock market’s reaction to the Starr report (stocks were up because the report
contained no bombshells), and an editorial on the scandal?
The
release of the report raises another interesting aspect of the Internet. The
report on the Watergate investigation years before the development of the
Internet has never been released. Nor was it written as a narrative, according
to Jim Doyle, former special assistant to the Watergate Special Prosecutors. It was an index to the documents, all of
which were sealed from the public by members of Congress. In the current case, Starr expressed
apparent chagrin at the release of the report.
But some Republican lawmakers told reporters that the report was
released for political reasons: they felt that the contents of the report would
so disgust the public that Americans would come to favor impeachment and conviction
after opposing it for nearly a year. If
that is true, the Internet, which made the wide and immediate release of the
report so easy, takes on a new political role:
It
lifted long-held documents from the hands of government and placed them in the
realm of direct democracy.
In
the end, this attempt at direct democracy to change public opinion backfired. The public did not change its mind and the
president was not convicted. So, what
does the Internet mean for democracy? Does
it move us toward direct democracy?
The
Starr report remained newsworthy far longer than just the week it came out.
CNN’s Woelfel observes: “As more materials became public and as the impeachment
process moved forward, we were able to link new stories back to the Starr
report to add context to what was happening.
It became a living document that we used over and over. It’s still up on
our site for that reason and we plan to keep it up indefinitely.”
At
the outset of the scandal, the Internet was still in its infancy. By the time
the Starr report was released eight months later, the tables had turned: The
Internet largely dictated how the story played out, and online news
organizations responded with respectful, restrained, serious coverage.
By
late 1998, Internet news had turned into a mass phenomenon. Washingtonpost.com saw its traffic jump from
25 million page views in December 1997 to about 70 million a month one year
later. Other news sites saw similar
gains. But perhaps more important than
the phenomenal growth in visitors are new questions journalists must address as
they continue to deliver the news.
Ten
days after the online stampede for the Starr report, a new round of web mania
erupted as visitors flocked to watch video of Clinton’s August 17, 1998,
testimony before Starr’s grand jury. The
House Judiciary Committee voted to make public the four hours of ostensibly
sealed testimony the president had given before a federal grand jury the
previous month. Latimes.com saw a
significant bump in traffic that day. “We
were frankly amazed at the tens of thousands of people who demonstrated they
will use even low-quality video when something is of interest to them,” Gentry
says. The site was able to provide both
the live feed of the pre-recorded event as it was released by the House, and
RealVideo snippets of key highlights.
Remarkably,
several cable news operations reported wider viewership on their web sites than
on their cable channels, tapping into the thousands of workplaces with PCs and
high-speed net access but no with television sets. Because bandwidth-hogging video travels far slower over modem
lines than does text, CNN.com removed all its other video from the site so that
users could call up the grand jury video segments at a reasonably brisk
pace. Two years later, it remains the
site’s busiest day yet for serving video.
News
sites flexed their multimedia muscles again 11 days later when they posted
audiotapes and transcripts of Linda Tripp’s phone conversations with Monica
Lewinsky, released by the House Judiciary Committee. Until the Starr investigation, few news sites had gone through
the trouble of producing video or sound files.
As 1998 drew to a close, multimedia had become another quiver in the
arsenal of many news sites.
By
the summer of 2000, Internet usage had risen to 54 percent, according to a
survey by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press. More striking was the extent to which the
credibility of on-line news had risen. In
fact, among the more well-known news organizations, the public often awarded
more credibility to the organization’s web site than to the organization
itself. For example, 44 percent of respondents rated ABCNews.com (the website
of ABC News) highly credible while only 29 percent gave that rating to the
network itself. Fully 54 percent gave
CNN.com a high believability rating, compared with only 40 percent that felt
that way about CNN’s cablecast. At
least for the time, the public seems to value the Internet as a way to get
unfiltered, unanalyzed information.
Whether that trust grows or dwindles to the levels of print and
broadcast news is yet to be seen.
JD
Lasica is Internet Correspondent for the American Journalism Review.