A No-Win Situation   

For the media, Paula Corbin Jones meant nothing but problems. If they played up her allegations against President Clinton, they could be accused of practicing tabloid journalism. If they ignored the charges, they could be accused of going too easy on the president.

It was a cold, snowy Friday when Paula Corbin Jones held her first press conference in the nation's capital, the kind of day when reporters look for excuses to stay inside. Yet on February 11, as many as 50 reporters and photographers showed up at the Omni Shoreham Hotel's Diplomat Room.

On the dais, Jones, a petite woman in a short skirt, looked nervous; she had a story to tell. On May 8, 1991, she had been handing out name tags at a one-day conference for manufacturing executives and government officials at a Little Rock hotel. She said an Arkansas state trooper approached and told her Gov. Bill Clinton wanted to meet her in his hotel room and talk. Once there, she says, she regretted going.

In the hotel room, she said, Clinton took her hand and loosened his tie. "You have nice curves," Jones said Clinton told her. "I love the way your hair goes down your body." Jones said he pulled her to him, slid his hand up her leg and asked for a "type of sex."

Clinton had been accused of womanizing before. But this was different. Jones was accusing the president of the United States of sexual harassment, claiming she was traumatized by the incident but did not file a complaint out of fear she'd lose her job as a clerk for a state agency. She provided two affidavits from friends to back up her account.

When the hour-long press conference ended, reporters gathered to discuss how to handle it. The feeling, according to New Republic Senior Editor Mickey Kaus, was that if CNN carried Jones' tale, the networks and the New York Times would run it and it would become a big story.

"Chatting with colleagues afterwards the general consensus was, 'Hmmmmm,' " says Deborah Orin, the New York Post's Washington bureau chief. "It was not, 'This is unbelievable.' I'm not trying to suggest that everyone in the room was convinced that this woman is telling the truth. There seemed to be a general feeling among those present that there was a story here and a story worth telling."

But it was barely told.

CNN and two of the networks were silent on the subject. ABC aired a 30-second report. And the newspaper reaction was less than overwhelming.

The following day, the Washington Times, New York Post and Arkansas Democrat-Gazette played the story on their front pages. The Los Angeles Times weighed in with a substantial story on page 21. But many papers relied on the wire services, generally running brief stories inside if anything at all. A short item appeared on page 59 of the Boston Globe. The New York Times carried a five-paragraph, staff-written story on page eight. The Washington Post did not mention Paula Jones and her allegations.

"It was bizarre to be at an event with a whole bunch of reporters and then have it be a non-event," says Kaus. "It was a very queasy feeling. It was especially queasy reading the Washington Post the next day."

One of the reasons for the lukewarm response was the setting, which made the press suspicious of Jones' motives. She spoke at the hotel where the Conservative Political Action Conference was taking place, in an appearance orchestrated by Cliff Jackson, a onetime friend of Clinton's who had become his archenemy.

But something else disturbed editors. Although Jones did provide some corroboration, her charges couldn't be proven – it was basically her word against the president's. And there was the issue of sex. After playing up Gennifer Flowers' assertion in 1992 that she had had a long-running affair with Clinton, the mainstream media were sharply criticized for sinking to tabloid levels. (See "Media Lemmings Run Amok!" April 1992.)

"We didn't run a story that night because we didn't deem it to be newsworthy because she was making charges that could not be verified," says CBS Washington Bureau Chief Barbara Cochran. "Obviously sexual harassment is a serious subject. But her making a claim particularly of such a serious nature when she had not sought the legal remedies available to her was just not appropriate to make a story out of it."

Paula Jones' press conference put the media in an uncomfortable position. This was an on-the-record accusation, not of illicit sex, but of sexual harassment. If the media played the allegations prominently, they'd be accused of wallowing in sleaze, of tarnishing the president by trumpeting unproven charges leveled at a forum sponsored by his political enemies. If they played the charges down or ignored them, they were vulnerable to attack for protecting the president, withholding information from readers and ignoring Jones because she was not a professional woman.

Jones' charges did not receive widespread exposure until nearly three months later, when she filed a suit against Clinton.

"As a citizen, I find the whole thing disgusting," says Peter Bhatia, managing editor of Portland's Oregonian. "I wish it would go away. As a journalist, it's a no-win situation. There's no absolutely right way to cover it. There's no winner after nine innings."

y the standards of the past, Paula Jones' allegations were well covered. Years ago, sex was not news, at least as far as politicians were concerned. President Kennedy's avid pursuit of women, for example, went unreported until years after his death.

But all of that changed dramatically after Gary Hart challenged reporters to follow him if they suspected that he was cheating on his wife. The Miami Herald did, and the ensuing account of his relationship with model Donna Rice ended his political career. When Washington Post reporter Paul Taylor asked Hart if he had ever been unfaithful, it was clear that all barriers were down.

Then came Gennifer Flowers, who sold her story to the tabloid Star. Virtually every news operation ran Flowers' allegations, and for a time it seemed the saga might destroy Clinton's quest for the Democratic presidential nomination. But Clinton survived, and in the aftermath there was widespread sentiment inside and outside journalism that the press had gone too far, that it had overplayed unproven allegations that seemed trivial compared to the serious issues facing the nation.

It was against this backdrop that Troopergate came to the fore late last year. Several publications ran stories about charges that state troopers had helped arrange liaisons for then-Gov. Bill Clinton (see Free Press, March). But the story had a short shelf life. There was a sense that the issue of Clinton's womanizing had been dealt with, and the motivations of his accusers, who were seeking a book deal, aroused suspicions.

One of those troopers, Danny Ferguson, is at the center of the Paula Jones story. Last year Ferguson, who worked closely with Clinton, told his story – on a not-for-attribution basis – to David Brock of the conservative American Spectator magazine and to the Los Angeles Times. Tucked into Brock's 13,000-word January article was a one-paragraph reference to a woman identified only as Paula.

According to Ferguson, who is now publicly acknowledged to be Brock's source, Clinton asked the trooper to bring "Paula" up to his hotel room. "On this particular evening, after her encounter with Clinton, which lasted no more than an hour as the trooper stood by in the hall, the trooper said Paula told him she was available to be Clinton's regular girlfriend if he so desired," wrote Brock.

When Jones saw the article, she was angry. She wanted to clear her name and get an apology from Clinton. It had not happened the way Ferguson said, she asserted. Her lawyer at the time, Danny Traylor, contacted Clinton foe Cliff Jackson.

Jackson was planning to speak at the Conservative Political Action Conference in February and wanted to hold a press conference to announce the creation of a fund for troopers who had lost their jobs for coming forward with their charges against Clinton. Jackson invited Traylor to join him but added that the location and Jackson's presence might hurt Jones' credibility. Despite his warning, on February 11, Jackson, Traylor, Jones and two troopers faced the press.

"I can remember very distinctly the mood among the reporters there," says Michael Hedges of the Washington Times. "The attitude was, 'We had to come out in the snowstorm for this?' There was a very derisive attitude among reporters before she had said a word."

Traylor said Jones wanted an apology and she might sue if she didn't get one. "When he said he didn't want to harm the president, reporters started to laugh," says Jackson. "But he genuinely meant it... But to get up there and say that, it was treated like a joke by the media. This set up an excuse for the media not to make that particular press conference a major event."

Afterwards, Hedges of the Washington Times and Orin of the New York Post dashed back to their offices certain they had a good story. Orin had no trouble convincing her editors, she says, "because it's a great tabloid story. We ran it big."

Both Hedges and Orin checked out as much of Jones' story as they could before deadline and secured a White House reaction, which was that Clinton didn't recall meeting Jones. The Times ran a 1,117-word story. The Post's front page headline screamed "Indecent Proposal."

It was page one news in Little Rock as well.

"Basically, it was a month and a half after Troopergate and this was just another indication that there may be more serious problems with how the president has handled some personal matters," says Bob Lutgen, managing editor of the Democrat-Gazette. "The allegations are fairly serious. A sexual harassment charge is something not to be taken lightly."

Others took a more cautious approach. Like ABC, many newspapers ran short stories. The Phoenix Gazette, St. Petersburg Times, Rocky Mountain News, Des Moines Register, Dallas Morning News, Chicago Tribune, Houston Chronicle and Louisville Courier-Journal all ran inside stories of fewer than 500 words the day after the press conference.

"We put it on the record so people [would] know it's there," says Jim Verhulst, news editor of the St. Petersburg Times. "We [didn't] know what to make of it. Our readers are better served by our being restrained and perhaps underplaying it than by blasting it out and having to make good and skin back later if it turns out to be completely overblown."

For the Los Angeles Times, it was an easy call. Political reporter Robert Shogan wrote an 879-word story.

"For us, when Paula Jones had her press conference that was not the first we had heard of it," says Times reporter William Rempel. (Rempel and colleague Douglas Frantz had written the first major Troopergate story to appear in a newspaper shortly before Christmas.) "We heard the story of Paula without her name in August 1993 after a long conversation with some troopers who told the story on background. We didn't use it in the original piece on troopers."

According to Tim Graham of the conservative Media Research Center, Traylor had committed a major gaffe when he chose the venue for Jones' press conference. "If you're trying to avoid the appearance of political motivation, it's obvious that you don't have a press conference with the Conservative Political Action Conference," says Graham. "These people were not so politically sophisticated."

Many editors and reporters agree that the presence of Jackson and the site of the press conference helped sink the story.

"We..just felt that because of the partisan setting it was in and because she had not taken legal action but was threatening legal action, we would wait for her actually to do the thing or not," says Dan Goodgame, Time magazine's Washington bureau chief.

Bill Headline, CNN's Washington bureau chief, says the nature of the event was one of the reasons his network passed on the story. "It had to do with the organization that was sponsoring it," he says, "had to do with the vagueness of her charges, had to do with the fact that we had just done a fairly thorough job on the Troopergate story and didn't think we needed to go any further."

The media's general uneasiness about how to deal with sexual allegations also contributed to the lack of coverage.

"It's a very tough area to set yourself up as a judge," says Newsweek columnist Joe Klein, "especially in an era of moral relativism, in an era of divorce, in an era when strict Victorian rules have fallen. I think we should err in the direction of not covering sex and other personal things."

The New York Times' Allan M. Siegal, an assistant managing editor, offered another reason for not running more than the Times did. "Until there's some reason to think that these assertions are substantiated, it's not front page news and it's not big news for this newspaper," he says. "We are very wary of being used and very wary of being used in a way that makes us unfair."

From the beginning, the memory of Anita Hill was never far from the debate about how Paula Jones should be covered. Feminists championed Hill's sexual harassment charges against conservative Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas, and the media gave them prominent treatment. But many news outlets downplayed Jones at first, and feminists agonized over how to react to her. Conservatives railed that a double standard seemed to come into play when such charges were aired against a liberal president.

"If you look back, Anita Hill's allegations were on the front page of most newspapers," says Josette Shiner, managing editor of the Washington Times. "We just did not see a vast difference. In fact, Paula Jones seemed to have more corroboration. We felt given that, given the play in the one other similar case to this, we felt that it deserved attention."

Orin agrees. "If Anita Hill was a great story," she says, "then this is a great story. I'm kind of befuddled by the coverage. Thinking it's a great story doesn't mean making a judgment whether either one of them is telling the whole truth and nothing but the truth."

Others argue that there are vast differences between the two episodes. Hill made her charges while Thomas' nomination was pending; Jones didn't say a word during the presidential campaign. Hill initially rebuffed the overtures of Senate staffers to go public; Jones appeared alongside a Clinton foe at a political event. Furthermore, some feminists say journalists should be skeptical of difficult-to-prove sexual harassment charges, pointing out that such cases aren't all alike and shouldn't be treated as if they were.

Nonetheless, Jones' story provided conservatives much grist. As they saw it, the media's treatment of Jones was classist and unfair. They enumerated the similarities and jumped all over the press for putting Hill stories on the front page and ignoring Jones because she was affiliated with a right-wing group.

Hill, a well-spoken Yale-educated lawyer, is a striking contrast to Jones, a secretarial school dropout from rural Arkansas with a penchant for tight skirts. To conservatives and other critics, the elitist press dismissed Jones because of her background. They got some ammunition when Evan Thomas, Newsweek's Harvard-educated Washington bureau chief, lashed out at Jones on the television show "Inside Washington."

"Yes, the case is being fomented by right-wing nuts, and yes, she is not a very credible witness and it's really not a law case at all," said Thomas, dismissing Jones as "some sleazy woman with big hair coming out of the trailer parks." Thomas later apologized, but the damage had been done.

"The media just thinks it's a bimbo eruption when [Jones] does it but when Anita Hill does it, she's Saint Anita come down from heaven," says Brent Bozell of the Media Research Center.

Conservatives believe too that the liberal press passed on Jones because it didn't want to hurt Clinton. They cite Mickey Kaus' March 7 column in the New Republic: "Clinton is also the best president we've had in a long time. That is the unspoken reason the sex charges haven't received as much play as you might expect. Reporters are patriots, too; it's their dirty little secret."

Not publicizing the charges immediately may well be justifiable. But why didn't other news organizations check them out independently, as the Washington Post did? (See "The Post and Paula Jones," page 30.)

CBS' Cochran says she had a producer and correspondent in Little Rock look into Jones' allegations, but no story resulted. "You should be aware that CBS' policy has been very stringent on this," she says. "We have been very reluctant to get into these kind of tabloid charges and countercharges."

The New York Times didn't follow up because doing so would have been a waste of resources resulting in an inconclusive story, says Washington Editor Andrew Rosenthal. "If some other news organization thinks the best way to expend resources is to assign three people to find out whether they'll be able to determine what happened in some hotel room where only two people were present, that's fine," he says. "But it seems like a pretty fruitless endeavor... The final conclusion inevitably of this investigation is going to be that there were two people in the room. What's the point?"

Says Larry J. Sabato, professor of government at the University of Virginia and an outspoken critic of the media for overdoing scandal coverage, "I think editors were right to be skeptical to begin with. But we have a right to be more critical of news organizations with the resources to check this out. There's definitely enough there to make you think."

In any event, the blackout ended in dramatic fashion in early May.

Clinton hired prominent Washington lawyer Robert Bennett to represent him in connection with Jones' charges. The Washington Post used this development as a peg to run its own investigative report on the allegations on May 4. Two days later Jones filed a suit against Clinton and trooper Danny Ferguson in federal court in Little Rock claiming "intentional infliction of emotional distress."

The result was extensive coverage from the print and electronic media. Nearly three months after Jones' ill-starred press conference, her accusations at last had become major news.

Says NPR Managing Editor Bruce Drake, "Certainly when it became clear she would file a suit, there was not a question in our minds that we were going to cover it."

Des Moines Register Managing Editor David Westphal agrees. "We thought it was a story because of the unusual nature of a president being brought to court in a civil action," he says.

After the February press conference, Rosenthal says, the New York Times decided to cover the story exactly as it had covered Gennifer Flowers – in a very low-key fashion. But the approach changed when the suit was filed. The paper ran a long, detailed story the following day (albeit inside, not on page one like virtually everyone else).

"The criteria we used in this case was that when [Jones] filed a lawsuit she was putting herself in the position where she would presumably have to go in and testify under oath," Rosenthal says. "That qualitatively changes the situation."

Others argue that legal action is a slender reed to support a news decision. "In the course of our discussions about how to play the thing, I brought up several really spurious suits brought against major political figures and national ones by people who didn't have anything," says Dan Goodgame of Time. "Anyone with the money can file a lawsuit. This one, of course, has more than that in terms of substantiation."

Washington Post columnist Richard Harwood wondered why Jones' story was no big deal in February, but a very big deal in May. "Is it," he wrote, "simply because a lawyer submitted a piece of paper to a court?"

The Boston Globe ran four front page stories – the Washington Post investigative piece and stories on the hiring of Bennett, the filing of the lawsuit and White House strategy – in one week. "We felt we couldn't ignore it entirely because we don't know the truth of the allegations," says Christine Chinlund, the Globe's national editor. "It would be a disservice to our readers to ignore it."

But do readers care? By May 18, 93 percent of the American public had heard or read about Paula Jones and her charges, according to an ABC News/Washington Post poll. Only 17 percent of the 1,523 adults polled said they believed Jones, while twice as many believed Clinton's denial. Forty-three percent thought the charges were important; 45 percent concluded they weren't.

The Boston Globe also attempted to gauge interest by asking, in a front page "reader feedback" feature, how important readers thought the Paula Jones story was. By a two-to-one margin, they said the allegations weren't important.

"It's been a hard issue for us," Chinlund says. "It involves the president. It involves graphic charges of sexual harassment. The difficult questions about the credibility of the accuser. Trying to decide how best to weigh her allegations. I think these are all questions that we would prefer not to deal with. These are not easy stories." l