Burying News on the Op-Ed Page   

A member of former President Bill Clinton's staff called Washington Post reporter John F. Harris the afternoon of Saturday, February 17 to give him a tip.

Clinton, under fire for suspect last-minute pardons of felons, was at last ready to defend his moves, the source told Harris, in an op-ed piece that was slotted for Sunday's paper. Clinton had, however, made his arrangement not with the Post but with the New York Times. The Clinton camp a short time later e-mailed the full text of the former president's op-ed explanation to Harris, who had covered the Clinton White House.

The way the Clinton organization handled the op-ed piece caused the two great competing newspapers to play the story in radically different ways. Readers who compared only the front pages of the Times and the Post that day might have assumed the Post had gotten an edge. On A1 of the Post: a story by Harris and fellow Post reporter James V. Grimaldi on Clinton's defense. On A1 of the Times: not a peep about the William Jefferson Clinton bylined op-ed, which was buried in the Times' weekly section of opinion and analysis, Week in Review.

Why the Times chose to let Clinton's words speak for themselves rather than subject them to a reporter's questions in the same day's newspaper is an editorial decision Times editors declined to discuss. Calls to Managing Editor Bill Keller and Editorial Page Editor Howell Raines asking for comment were not returned.

The Times decided to follow Clinton's piece the next day with a front-page story written by Joseph Kahn. Kahn questioned Senate and House leaders about the eight reasons Clinton cited in his piece for pardoning fugitive financier Marc Rich. The headline read, "Clinton's Defense of Pardons Brings Even More Questions." U.S. Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) told inquisitors on NBC's "Meet the Press" that Sunday that he thought Clinton ought to appear voluntarily before the Senate Judiciary Committee to answer questions about the pardons, Kahn reported.

The Post did what it did out of necessity, according to Maralee Schwartz, a national political editor who was on duty Saturday when Harris got his tip.

While the Clinton organization had given the text of the former president's piece to Harris in advance, the Post proceeded with the understanding that it was the property of the Times, Schwartz says. Only once did Harris quote from the text and then only within the context of a response Clinton gave him during an interview on Saturday.

"I don't know what we would have done had they decided to give the op-ed piece to us" instead of the Times, Schwartz says. "I'm glad we had the opportunity to write the news story about the piece."

While Harris and Grimaldi went to work, Schwartz contacted National Editor Liz Spayd at home. Managing Editor Steve Coll got involved to decide where to play the story. Coll thought Clinton's defense belonged on the front page.

"Here is this guy getting hammered for a month and he's speaking out for the first time," Spayd says. "It was a good, strong story of the former president offering a full-throated explanation for his pardons."

Spayd says that had the Post gotten the exclusive on the op-ed, she would have made a case to have a reporter follow it that day in order to run a story on the news side. "It was worthy of being covered as a news event," she says. Whether or not the editorial department would have shared it with the news side, Spayd says she cannot say.

The front-page story by Harris and Grimaldi quoted Clinton as saying the pardons of Rich and financier Pincus Green were "in the best interests of justice" and that he had "legal and foreign policy reasons" for granting the pardons. The story went on to characterize the former president as "mournful," saying that he implied ongoing political hostility toward him was fueling the criticism. The reporters pointed out that the op-ed piece didn't contain anything Clinton had not already said in brief interviews. They also referred to the column as one element of a "damage control" campaign launched by Clinton loyalists.

At midnight Sunday, washingtonpost.com posted the text of Clinton's piece, crediting the New York Times, with links to the Harris and Grimaldi story.

Presumably, the New York Times had at least as much time as the Post to react that Saturday to the Clinton op-ed. Spayd points out that often there exists "the old Chinese wall" between the news and editorial departments. But she resists speculation.

"When I saw that they didn't have a news story," Spayd says, "I thought that was odd."