NBC News has taken a lot of heat in recent weeks for withholding an interview with Juanita Broaddrick, the Arkansas nursing home operator who said President Clinton raped her. Critics howl that the network was trying to protect Clinton. More likely, it was following the time-tested wisdom of the old Chicago City News Bureau slogan: If your mother says she loves you, check it out.
Journalists are not obliged to disseminate unconfirmed charges against anyone, not even a president.
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Unconfirmed news is not news. It is gossip. It is appropriate, then, that this story was leaked initially by Internet gossip Matt Drudge, who does not always let the pursuit of truth get in the way of a juicy story.
It was Drudge, you will recall, whose report that Newsweek was holding back a story about Clinton and an intern for further checking led Newsweek to release its first Monica Lewinsky story on its Web page in January 1998. Newsweek was understandably cautious about rushing the story into print. It had not even given Lewinsky and other principals a chance to respond. Nevertheless, Drudge charged “censorship.” Conventional journalists call it “editing.”
With the Broaddrick story, it took more than Drudge to make NBC budge. Drudge reported that NBC had an interview in which Broaddrick accused President Clinton of sexually assaulting her in her hotel room in 1978. NBC refused to discuss the story. It was still working on it, spokesmen said.
That brought several weeks of insinuations from various critics that NBC was covering up for Clinton. Significantly, the critics included House Majority Whip Tom DeLay (R-Texas) and Chris Matthews, host of a show on CNBC, a corporate sister to NBC News.
The Broaddrick story apparently didn’t meet The Wall Street Journal’s news standards, either. Still, it surfaced oddly in a Feb. 19 Wall Street Journal editorial page essay by editorial writer Dorothy Rabinowitz, based on Rabinowitz’s own interview with Broaddrick. The next day, the Washington Post published a long, front-page news story explaining that it had interviewed Broaddrick off-the-record months earlier but had won her consent to go public only after the Journal piece appeared.
Four more days passed before NBC aired the interview on Feb. 24. Only then, said the network’s news chiefs, were they satisfied with their account of the story.
NBC and others who had heard Broaddrick had ample reasons to subject her story to a thorough “smell” test. To understand why, you need look back no further than another Drudge tidbit, the Clinton “love child” story.
For years, a Little Rock prostitute claimed Clinton fathered her son in a quickie tryst. Photos of the child popped up on an Internet Web site and the story even surfaced in a question from a gadfly journalist in a White House press conference, where Clinton’s press spokesman shot it down.
Then during Clinton’s impeachment hearing, a tabloid obtained Clinton’s DNA data from independent counsel Kenneth Starr’s boxes of evidence and ran a DNA test on the boy with his mother’s permission. Before the test results came back, word of the tabloid’s story leaked and was reported nationwide by the most unorthodox pundits of all, late-night comedians Jay Leno and David Letterman and a variety of talk-radio hosts, who declared Clinton’s paternity as if it were an established fact. Unlike journalists, comedians don’t need credibility. They only have to be funny.
After a week of this, the DNA tests came back negative. “Not even close,” said one expert. Mainstream news media that had taken a pass on the story were vindicated. The gossips and comics moved on to new material.
Broaddrick has given conflicting accounts of her own story and failed to come up with supporting witnesses who don’t have axes to grind. Over the years she has told the “rape” story to friends, then denied it to reporters. She also denied it to lawyers for Paula Jones. Then, to Starr’s investigators, she has retracted the denial. Even House managers, who eagerly used Monica Lewinsky’s testimony in their efforts to convict Clinton, took a pass on using Broaddrick’s testimony.
None of this absolves Clinton of accountability for his stupid behavior. Ever since his televised finger-wagging denial of sexual relations with Lewinsky proved to be a lie, his credibility has suffered, perhaps irreparably.
Nevertheless, the credibility of those who make charges against the president and the media who convey them also is at stake. The explosion of information provided by the Internet is a good thing in the long run, but it also obliges us information consumers to be even more cautious about what we are consuming.
For that reason, the NBC-Broaddrick affair confirms the conventional journalistic wisdom: When in doubt, check it out, no matter what your detractors shout.