A History of Sex and Journalism

By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, February 25, 2008 8:51 AM

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 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 affairs, 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 sex 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.

Generation Gap

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.

Furthermore . . .

Buzz Machine's Jeff Jarvis goes off on Bill Keller's insistence that the McCain story was far broader than a piece about a possible affair:

"That the editors of the Times don't see that is incredible -- that is to say, not credible. They can't be that clueless, can they? They can't be that bad at understanding news and politics, public opinion and media, surely. So are they merely trying to spin us? Are they embarrassed at what they did? Are they trying to convince themselves as well as us that this sex story -- the sort of thing these high-fallutin' journalists would usually insist is the stuff of Drudge and blogs and tabloids -- is just an illustration in their bigger point about the life and times of John McCain? Surely, they can't thing we're that dumb. Surely, they're not that dumb."

Well, the media have decided to harp on McCain's age. "McCain's Age May Figure In Choice of a Running Mate," says the NYT. And the LAT uses the transparent device of rounding up old people:

"Frankie La Rosa likes everything about John McCain's politics. He likes his moderation. He likes his integrity. He even read one of his books. But when the primary rolls around here April 22, he plans to vote for Hillary Rodham Clinton.

"Why? Because McCain, 71, would be the oldest president ever elected to a first term, and in La Rosa's book, that's just too old. La Rosa knows this because he's old, too -- 78."

I can attest that McCain put in some pretty long days on the trail for a doddering man who's falling apart.

Ralph Nader is running again! Well, last time he got 0.38 percent of the vote. So I propose that he get 0.38 percent of the media attention.

Barack Obama is getting some Republican votes.

The obits for the Hillary campaign are already rolling in. "If she is not temperamentally suited to reckon with the possibility of losing quite yet, advisers say, she is also a cold, hard realist about politics -- at some point, she is known to say, someone will win and someone will not," says the New York Times.

"Over take-out meals and late-night drinks, some regrets and recriminations have set in, and top aides have begun to face up to the campaign's possible end after the Texas and Ohio primaries on March 4. Engaging in hindsight, several advisers have now concluded that they were not smart to use former President Bill Clinton as much as they did, that 'his presence, aura and legacy caused national fatigue with the Clintons,' in the words of one senior adviser who spoke on condition of anonymity to assess the campaign candidly."

The adviser has a point. Even if you liked Bill Clinton, the whole idea of a co-presidency began to seem a little wearying.

Hillary dismissed that story yesterday, and seems to have a new slogan: Obama, He's No Messiah.

"Now, I could stand up here and say, 'Let's just get everybody together. Let's get unified.' The skies will open, the light will come down, celestial choirs will be singing and everyone will know we should do the right thing and the world will be perfect."

Frank Rich likens the Hillary campaign to President Bush's handling of the Iraq war--a bad plan that was undone by an insurgency:

"Clinton fans don't see their standard-bearer's troubles this way. In their view, their highly substantive candidate was unfairly undone by a lightweight showboat who got a free ride from an often misogynist press and from na¿ve young people who lap up messianic language as if it were Jim Jones's Kool-Aid. Or as Mrs. Clinton frames it, Senator Obama is all about empty words while she is all about action and hard work.

"But it's the Clinton strategists, not the Obama voters, who drank the Kool-Aid. The Obama campaign is not a vaporous cult; it's a lean and mean political machine that gets the job done. The Clinton camp has been the slacker in this race, more words than action, and its candidate's message, for all its purported high-mindedness, was and is self-immolating."

There is still a little bit of MSM skepticism toward Obama, as in this Washington Post editorial:

"When the Illinois Democrat talks about bringing together red and blue America, does he mean that he will persuade the red (Republican) part to come around to blue (Democratic) policies -- or does he mean that he will forge a new, centrist answer that will bridge the red-blue divide? Is he a liberal at heart who tacks occasionally to the center or more of a centrist capable of suppressing leftist instincts when political circumstances demand?

"It's telling, at this relatively late stage in the nominating process, that the answers are not clear -- at least not to us."

Peggy Noonan tries to deconstruct Obama's appeal:

"His big draw is this. In a country that has throughout most of our lifetimes been tormented by, buffeted by, the question of race, a country that has endured real pain and paid in blood and treasure to work its way through and out of the mess, that for all that struggle we yielded this: a brilliant and accomplished young black man with a consensus temperament, a thoughtful and peaceful person who wishes to lead. That is his draw: 'We made that.' 'It ended well.'

"People would love to be able to support that guy.

"His job, in a way, is to let them, in part by not being just another operative, plaything or grievance-monger of the left-liberal establishment and left-liberal thinking. By standing, in fact, for real change.

"Right now Mr. Obama is in an awkward moment. Each day he tries to nail down his party's leftist base, and take it from Mrs. Clinton. At the same time his victories have led the country as a whole to start seeing him as the probable Democratic nominee. They're looking at him in a new way, and wondering: Is he standard, old time and party line, or is he something new? Is he just a turning of the page, or is he the beginning of a new and helpful chapter?"

In her zipless analysis, Erica Jong wonders about the Obama/Hillary contrast:

"What is this foolishness? Obama is pure and not a politician and Hillary is 'tainted'?

"Does anyone get to be a presidential candidate in our country without being a politician?

"Does anyone run for political office -- a humiliating and exhilarating marathon -- without wanting power more than sleep?

"Come on. Get real. You and I could never endure the punishment of debates, of columnists who don't fact-check, of swift-boaters, of dumb pundits and corrupt colleagues, without the lust for power being the overriding emotion in your life.

"I do a book tour of six cities and come down with the flu -- and I'm pretty strong and healthy. I can hardly imagine what candidates go through. Yes, they fly on private jets. Yes, they don't take their shoes off at the airport, but they don't sleep either. I'm amazed they can even croak a coherent sentence."

And in the can-that-really-be-true category, Michael Medved looks at presidential history: "It's worth considering one striking trait that nearly all these men seem to have shared --an astonishing 38 of our 43 presidents had blue eyes." (His definition includes gray and hazel.)

In case you were wondering, McCain's are blue and Obama's are brown. And I just did a search on Hillary and came up with this breathless Drudge report from 2003:

"Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton has settled on a fresh bright baby-blue hue for eyes in recent photoshoots and public appearances -- a dramatic transformation from her natural hazel tint!"