By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, February 25, 2008; C01

When Gennifer Flowers held a news conference in 1992 to announce that she had carried on an affair with Bill Clinton, the New York Times devoted one paragraph of a news story to her charges.

"I am ashamed for my profession," Max Frankel, then the paper's editor, said afterward. "We don't want to report on the candidates' sex lives."

Last week, when the Times quoted unnamed former associates of John McCain as saying they believed, in 1999, that he had an extramarital relationship with Washington lobbyist Vicki Iseman, a huge controversy erupted. This time, though, it was the Times that was harshly criticized.

To be sure, the piece included significant details about whether the Arizona senator had done legislative favors for Iseman's clients. And unlike the tabloid Star, which paid Flowers a six-figure sum, the Times has won dozens of Pulitzers for aggressive journalism. But with McCain and Iseman both denying an inappropriate relationship, a rough consensus is emerging among journalists that the Times story was fatally flawed.

Leave aside the uninformed charges that the story was politically timed. Forget for a moment that the key sources were granted anonymity. What, in the end, did the paper have? "Disillusioned" former McCain aides who say they were worried that their boss appeared too close to a lobbyist and tried to shoo her away. Details about letters to federal regulators that were mostly old news. And, of course, the suggestion of sex, the rocket fuel that boosted the story into the media stratosphere.

In a marked change since the Flowers era, the mere fact that a news organization is pursuing a scandal routinely leaks out. Matt Drudge became famous for reporting in 1998 that Newsweek had spiked a story about a special prosecutor investigating President Clinton's relationship with Monica Lewinsky. It was hardly surprising when Drudge's gossip site reported in December that Times staffers were pursuing the McCain story. Dissatisfied journalists tend to be talkative.

Twenty-one years after Miami Herald reporters staked out a townhouse where Gary Hart was having a rendezvous with Donna Rice, news organizations are still uncomfortable with stories about sex and political figures. There is, still, considerable agonizing over such pieces: Do we have enough evidence? How long ago did it happen? Is it relevant to the official's performance or just titillation disguised as serious journalism?

Several controversies have involved The Post. In 1992, the paper drew criticism for waiting until three weeks after then-Sen. Bob Packwood was reelected to report that 10 women had accused him of sexual harassment; editors said the story hadn't been ready earlier. (The Oregonian said it should have pursued the allegations against its home-state senator more aggressively, especially since Packwood had kissed one of its reporters.)

In 1994, The Post spent three months investigating Paula Jones's charge that Clinton, while Arkansas governor, had asked her for oral sex in a hotel room. Conservative critics accused the paper of sitting on the story. The Post ran a front-page piece after Jones sued Clinton (a move that ultimately led to his impeachment after he dissembled before a grand jury about his relationship with Lewinsky).

Two years later, both The Post and Time magazine decided against running pieces documenting that Bob Dole, then the GOP presidential nominee, had had an affair that began in 1968, while he was married to his first wife. Post Editor Leonard Downie Jr. said later that he based his decision on the fact that the matter did not involve Dole's public office and was nearly three decades old. The National Enquirer broke the story shortly before Election Day.

In early 1999, NBC came under tremendous pressure for holding, for more than a month, Lisa Myers's interview with Juanita Broaddrick, an Arkansas woman who charged that Clinton had sexually assaulted her in 1978. Clinton denied the allegation, and while The Post and the Wall Street Journal editorial page had reported Broaddrick's account, a television interview would have been explosive, as the Senate was preparing to vote on Clinton's impeachment. NBC executives, who ran the story after Clinton's acquittal, said the network needed more time to investigate.

Liberal anger over the Lewinsky probe sparked numerous efforts at revenge against Republican congressmen, such as Salon's report that Henry Hyde had had an affair 30 years earlier, and Hustler magazine's investigation of extramarital activities involving Bob Livingston, who resigned as he was about to become House speaker.

Tabloid outfits sometimes act as a conduit in bringing such stories to light. The National Enquirer reported in 2001 that the Rev. Jesse Jackson had fathered a child out of wedlock with a staffer in his Rainbow Coalition; that became big news when Jackson confirmed it. And it was a Hustler reporter who last year forced Louisiana Sen. David Vitter to admit having contacted a Washington escort service. (For that matter, years after the Star story, Clinton admitted to a sexual encounter with Flowers.)

Journalistic caution is easy to second-guess. In 2006, after the Miami Herald and St. Petersburg Times declined to publish a suggestive e-mail from then-congressman Mark Foley to a teenage House page, ABC's Brian Ross put it on his blog -- and gathered so much evidence of sexually explicit messages to other pages that Foley resigned the next day. The Idaho Statesman, which spent eight months investigating allegations that Sen. Larry Craig had engaged in gay sexual encounters, decided last year not to publish a story, in part because the sources would not be identified. The Statesman then ran its piece after Roll Call reported that Craig had pleaded guilty in a police sting operation in an airport bathroom. Craig has been fighting to withdraw the plea.

On rare occasions the decision is clear-cut. The Detroit Free Press last month published explicit text messages ("Did you miss me sexually?") between Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick and his chief of staff. The steamy stuff happened to contradict the couple's sworn denials in a lawsuit that they had had an affair.

The hardest thing in journalism is to spend months on a story and then admit you haven't got the goods. There is, instead, a tendency to dress the thing up with fine writing and larger themes in an effort to demonstrate that it's not just about sex, when of course that is the only element most readers -- and the rest of the media -- will focus on.

Indeed, Times ombudsman Clark Hoyt wrote yesterday that "if a newspaper is going to suggest an improper sexual affair, whether editors think that is the central point or not, it owes readers more proof than the Times was able to provide."

Many conservative commentators who cheered on every media revelation about Clinton's dalliances denounced the McCain story. Of course, it turned out that Clinton did have sexual relations with that woman, and of course McCain scored political points by denouncing a newspaper reviled on the right. But many journalists with no ideological ax to grind have also criticized the piece, and even most liberal bloggers haven't defended it. And The Washington Post, which ran a story on McCain and Iseman the same day that focused on lobbying but said nothing about romance, largely escaped the backlash.

In online comments Friday, Times Executive Editor Bill Keller seemed taken aback by "the volume of the reaction" and "by how lopsided the opinion was against our decision, with readers who described themselves as independents and Democrats joining Republicans in defending Mr. McCain from what they saw as a cheap shot. And, frankly, I was a little surprised by how few readers saw what was, to us, the larger point of the story."

That's the problem with journalists making unconfirmed charges about an affair alleged to have taken place nearly a decade earlier. The larger point, if there is one, gets lost.

Sometimes middle-aged editors just don't get it. Last September, 25-year-old Newsweek reporter Andrew Romano pitched a story on Barack Obama's appeal to young voters, and his 31-year-old editor approved. But as Romano wrote recently, their 43-year-old boss nixed the idea, saying he'd heard overblown claims of youth support in too many past campaigns. The evidence pointed to Managing Editor Dan Klaidman, who cheerfully admits to blowing the call.