Watergate vs. Monicagate   

AJR asked Jim Doyle, former Boston Globe Washington bureau chief and special assistant to the Watergate Special Prosecution Force, to cite key differences in how the media covered the two big presidential scandals. Doyle recently served as director of a Committee of Concerned Journalists study, "The Clinton/Lewinsky Story: How Accurate? How Fair?"

"The big difference was in the editing, not in the reporting. Reporters in both cases were aggressive in doing their job. There was more beat reporting in the Lewinsky case than in the Watergate case. In Watergate, news organizations that were early on that story and aggressive in their coverage did best. It was the reverse in the Clinton scandal.

"In Watergate, editing was very cautious. People didn't want to believe what was coming out... The Washington Post and other papers went very slowly and carefully in their coverage... The Lewinsky case is totally different. It fell on the American public full-blown. It's not a coincidence that news organizations that were the first with the most details of the Lewinsky story subsequently suffered from that [by making] mistakes and errors...

"You expect reporters to have good sources on their beats and come in and say, 'This is what they're saying.' It's the editor's job to weigh that and ask if this source is motivated more by suspicion than objectivity...

"It seems to me that editors are now admitting their sources biased their coverage and that they made mistakes by accepting those sources [such as] the Independent Counsel's Office or enemies of the president. If that's who you're saying your sources are, you have to be cautious...

"Reporting [in Watergate] took longer and especially television reporting was..sober reporting. There were opportunities for sensationalism, but it didn't happen because there weren't all these cable channels and talking heads..polarizing the situation more.

"In the Lewinsky case, if you couldn't get a line, you were dependent on what other news organizations were saying... Stories that were 'out there' were reported on.

"During Watergate, there was no circus surrounding the grand jury. No one knew about it. The press didn't know about it. You didn't have to run the gauntlet... Now everyone is paraded before the press."

--Interview by Stephanie Doster