Editor Retracts a
Portion of Starr Report
By Lloyd Grove
Friday, June 19, 1998; Page A09
Steven Brill retracted part of his attention-getting magazine article about the news media's reporting of the White House intern controversy yesterday as Attorney General Janet Reno said she is considering a Justice Department investigation of Brill's allegations against independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr.
The editor and publisher of Brill's Content -- the new media magazine's name -- apologized to the Wall Street Journal for what he called "honest confusion" about the ground rules of an interview with a Journal reporter and conceded that an account of the paper's reporting process was "wrong." Brill conceded error after learning that Journal reporter Glenn Simpson had tape-recorded the interview.
The Journal issued a statement expressing satisfaction that any mistakes or misquotations "were the result solely of misunderstanding." The problems arose over Brill's account of the sequence of the Journal's decision to report -- erroneously, as it turned out -- that White House steward Bayani Nelvis told a federal grand jury he saw President Clinton and Monica S. Lewinsky in a study off the Oval Office.
Brill said yesterday that while his first conversation with Simpson was off the record, a second interview was on the record. But Simpson asserts that no second interview took place, said Richard Tofel, a spokesman for Dow Jones Co., the Journal's publisher.
Meanwhile, Reno said at a news conference that she's weighing whether to open a probe of Brill's allegations that Starr and one of his top deputies improperly discussed grand jury material with reporters.
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