One of the more memorable characters I have come across lately is Clint Murtaugh in Robert R. McCammon's 1992 gothic novel, Gone South. Clint is a pale, delicate undersized creature. He has the added misfortune of being an appendage: he protrudes from the chest of his brother Flint, a large, brutish bounty hunter (who wears loose shirts to conceal Clint when he is out on a case). When Flint blunders into trouble, tie one on, Clint would share the hangover.

Many of the most serious reporters in the national press corps remind me a bit of Clint, at least when it comes to dealing with the private conduct of political figures. They have serious qualms about disclosing the sexual transgressions of others, and would prefer not to do so unless the misbehavior somehow affects the politician's performance in office. But, as the coverage of Gary Hart-Donna Rice in 1987 and Bill Clinton-Gennifer Flowers in 1992 demonstrates, such misgivings count for little. The Flint Murtaughs of the media spread the allegations anyway, dragging the Clints into the story against their will.

The way in which the most recent Clinton allegations came to be aired was a sign that, with each successive sex story, it becomes easier to maneuver serious reporters into covering what many doubt is a legitimate story. Cliff Jackson, the Arkansas lawyer and former Oxford classmate of the president's who is now an anti-Clinton crusader, became an adviser to the state troopers who had guarded the then governor and who alleged that he had used them to set up trysts. After the troopers' story broke, Jackson said that his aim all along was to get their tale published in the respected Los Angeles Times. He made the troopers available to reporters from that paper, who spent weeks investigating their sundry charges.

At the same time, he helped arrange for conservative David Brock of The American Spectator to conduct his own interviews and prepare a titillating, 11,000-word expose. It was cloaked as a scholarly account, with pedantic prose and footnotes, but it blithely intermingled fact, rumor, and conjecture about the sex lives of Clinton and his wife. (Brock -- who earlier published a controversial book attacking Anita Hill -- was particularly vicious about Hillary Rodham Clinton, depicting her as a foul-mouthed harpy who degraded the American flag, cursed underprivileged children, and, most horrifying of all, dispatched state troopers to fetch her tampons.)

In the weeks before Brock's piece appeared, the Los Angeles Times reporters kept digging away, seeking corroboration for the troopers' claims.

Pressure to air the story began to mount. After the Spectator arranged to publish its article on December 20, Jackson, who had become impatient, made sure the Los Angeles Times knew it was in danger of being scooped. Meanwhile, bootlegged advance copies of the Spectator were circulating around Washington to other news organizations, and Times editors were aware of this. The New Republic's Fred Barnes, who is on the Spectator editorial board, said on the Friday December 17 McLaughlin Group that a major magazine was about to uncork a big one about Clinton's alleged transgressions and abuses of power, but predicted that a newspaper that had the story might decline to print it. CNN went after the story. On the same day, ABC White House correspondent Brit Hume, an occasional contributor to The American Spectator, faxed the Brock article to ABC executives, arguing that it was a legitimate story for the network because it involved allegations that Clinton had used officers paid by tax money for private purposes.

On Sunday, December 19, the dam finally broke. Jackson -- increasingly concerned that the Los Angeles Times might spike the story -- authorized CNN to air an interview with the troopers that it had taped the day before on an embargoed basis. Jackson explained later to Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz that "we needed the national TV hammer." Despite some internal disagreement, CNN decided to air the allegations. CNN vice-president Ed Turner told Kurtz: "The fact the troopers were willing to go on camera was what made us decide to do a story . . . You never know if something is altogether truthful."

After the charges aired on CNN, The Associated Press filed a piece based on the broadcast, which was widely reprinted, an ABC and NBC aired the allegations. (CBS held back, citing insufficient corroboration of the troopers' claims).

On Monday, December 20, Los Angeles Times editor Shelby Coffey was still holding off, saying his paper's piece was not ready. It finally ran the next day.

Los Angeles Times national editor Norman Miller says the paper "made a deliberate decision to ignore competitive factors. . . . We did not want to be stampeded." Part of the reason for the delay in publication was what White House officials did not agree to be interviewed about the matter until late Sunday, Miller says.

Even if the Times hadn't been stampeded, it seems clear that Jackson, by giving the green light to CNN, had a major impact on how and when the story reached most of the audience.

The moves, and countermoves, of those promoting the story, and those who were critical of it, produced intense suspicions and bitter feelings even before anything was aired. Jackson, for instance, says he was convinced he was under surveillance and he and the troopers were fearful of being silenced in some way by the pro-Clinton forces. Jackson says he consequently approached Bob Dornan, the Republican representative from California who occasionally substitutes as host on the Rush Limbaugh radio call-in show, swore him to secrecy, and played him a tape of troopers making their allegations. Dornan was "our insurance policy," Jackson explains: Dornan would tell their tale if something happened to them. Jackson notes that, while Brock was preparing the Spectator piece, the magazine's offices were broken into three times and files were rifled. (Christopher Caldwell, assistant managing editor of the Spectator, confirms that there were break-ins on September 3 and September 10 in the magazine's Arlington, Virginia, offices and on September 22 in its New York office. What was odd, Caldwell says, was that there had never been a break-in before in the twenty-six year history of the magazine, that files appeared to have been searched, and that police said it was unusual that neither costly computer equipment nor money in desks had been stolen. On the other hand, some valuables were taken -- a cassette player, radio, fax machine, VCR, etc. "We are not pushing this as a break-in directed at our investigation," Caldwell says.)

On the other side of the spectrum, Jack Nelson, Washington bureau chief of the Los Angeles Times, complained on Washington Week In Review (December 24) that "there was a conspiracy, in my opinion, by right-wingers, including some right-wing journalists, to press this newspaper into running the story before it was ready to." He singled out ABC's Hume and The New Republic's Barnes, Hume retorted, in an interview with CJR, that talk of conspiracy was "a little nutty . . . a little extreme," and quipped that Nelson and Bobby Ray Inman (the erstwhile Defense Secretary nominee who withdrew, saying he was the victim of a plot by columnists to bring him down) may have been "seeing the same therapist." He also said Nelson reminded him of Captain Queeg of The Caine Mutiny carrying on about stolen strawberries.

Nelson also charges that Hume was spreading a rumor that Nelson had threatened to resign if the sex piece ran in his newspaper. Nelson denies ever Hume to be . . . spreading a lie about me is despicable." Hume says he did not try to spread the humor, which was all over town, but attempted to verify it. He adds that he is puzzled as to why Nelson got so upset, because a rumor about acting on principle is not derogatory.

As the various accounts spewed out, there came the familiar intramedia debate as to their legitimacy. New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis noted that "not one woman was produced in support of the charges" and denounced the coverage as a surrender to sensationalism. Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen attacked the idea that adultery, even if proven, is a key to overall character. He pointed out that Oskar Schindler, who risked his life and spent his fortune to save more than 1,000 Jews from Nazi gas chambers, was frenetic womanizer, and concluded: "His personal morality gave not a hint that his core was a block of granite-like morality." Newsday columnist Lars-Erik Nelson argued that the allegations of womanizing were stale and added: "Virtually everything the troopers say is unprovable, and much of it defies belief. They quote Clinton, for example, as admitting that 'he never met a tax he didn't like.' This is a plausible as my telling you that George Bush woke up every morning and asked himself, 'How can I be clueless again today?"

These critics, representing the higher standards of yore and the views of many serious journalists today, make persuasive points. But, needless to say, they have little discernible impact on the practice of journalism. This is because they represent a rational approach in a profession that has come to be dominated by bread and circuses. They ride like Clinton on the chest of the beast. In a sense, their situation is worse than Clint's: he was born to his predicament, while many of them can remember a time when they had more control. In the 1960s, after all, just a few dozen national reporters could define what is news, and they were able to decide that JFK's sexual adventures (an open secret) did not qualify.

Today, unfortunately, the rationalists have lost the power to set standards of relevancy. As Los Angeles Times media correspondent Tom Rosentiel pointed out in his book Strange Bedfellows, the advent of CNN, the growth of talk radio, the proliferation of new cable outlets and independent TV stations, and the increasingly blurred lines between news and entertainment have changed the shape of the news machine and the notion of what news is.

For higher-minded news organizations wishing too maintain their standards, the choices are limited. Ignoring a story they do not deem relevant is an option, in theory, but difficult in practice. Initially, The New York Times kept the trooper story at arm's length. When Times Washington bureau chief R. W. Apple was asked why his paper was downplaying it (the Times had run only a short wire piece on December 21), he replied that the Times was not a supermarket tabloid. But the next day his paper ran a front-page piece on the sex allegations. Hillary Rodham Clinton had denounced the charges, forcing the newspaper of record to serve up a certain amount of tabloid fare in order to explain her comments.

A second option is to downplay the more sensationalistic elements in a private-conduct story and play up the issues that seem most relevant to public policy. The Washington Post took his approach on December 21, stressing a statement from a White House official that Clinton tried to block publication of the allegations and highlighting charges that Clinton was misusing taxpayer-funded police bodyguards for recreational purposes. Other, more titillating allegations got short shrift. The paper wrote blandly that "the two troopers . . . make allegations about a strained relationship between Clinton and his wife, including accounts of extensive vulgarity."

One drawback to such an approach is that it can drive members of the audience into the arms of competitors. One reader recalls how the Post's reference to "vulgarity" piqued his curiosity. He went out immediately and bought a newspaper that was certain to have reported any vulgarities about Clinton that were available -- the Post's hardright rival, The Washington Times. The Washington Times article provided many graphic details from the Brock account, focusing heavily on allegations about oral sex. But it left some incidents out for lack of space. So our reader felt compelled to track down a copy of the Spectator itself. He closely read the most graphic passages -- e.g., one in which Clinton is alleged to have said that one woman "could suck a tennis ball through a garden hose." Then he reread certain of these passages. Only then was he ready to declare the piece to be irrelevant trash. This reader prefers not to be identified, but probably should be: it's me.

Rosenstiel is among those who advocate a sensible alternative to ignoring private-conduct stories or covering only those story elements that pertain to performance in office. He argues that serious news organizations should jump in and cover such stories first, before the sensationalists get to them; they should try to impose strong standards of accuracy, while letting the audience decide what is relevant.

The Los Angeles Times evidently was trying to take this approach in its own account of the troopers' allegations. It was on the story first. Its reporters -- William Rempel and Douglas Frantz -- interviewed the troopers extensively and tried to verify their allegations, studying telephone records, for instance, to confirm that Clinton had been calling a certain woman. The reporters did not print the salacious allegations and rumors about Mrs. Clinton that figure so prominently in the Spectator piece. The paper was far more responsible than the Spectator, or than CNN.

On the other hand, the Times piece had its weaknesses. For one thing, if the Times reporters had been able to continue reporting for a longer period, they might have done a better job weighing the troopers' credibility. Shortly after their piece appeared, the story broke that the two chief accusers -- officers Larry Patterson and Roger Perry -- had allegedly lied to insurance investigators to cover up how Patterson had wrecked a state police car while driving under the influence of alcohol. The original Times story would have been much stronger had this information been in it, giving the reader a better basis for determining what to believe.

Secondly, the paper could perhaps have done a better job dealing with the allegation that Clinton had tried to buy troopers' silence with the offer of federal jobs. That claim was mentioned in the lead of the story. Trooper Perry was then quoted as saying that another trooper, who refused to let his name be used, had been called by Clinton, who supposedly made the job offer. The White House denied the allegation. A few days later, evidently under pressure from the White House, the trooper's lawyer filed an affidavit, denying Clinton had offered jobs for silence. Miller says the Times reporters reinterviewed the trooper, who reiterated that Clinton had offered jobs but had not explicitly said they would be in return for silence. It would have been preferable to nail down this point before publication.

The story led to disagreements within the newspaper. Its media critic, David Shaw, was quoted as saying that, while it was a tough call, he did not think the piece should have been published. Others felt more reporting should have been done.

Despite its flaws the Times piece was a step in the right direction -- covering private conduct in a responsible way and trying to cull fact from rumor. That is probably the only way for Clint to force a bit into Flint's mouth and to have some hope of influencing the direction in which he charges.

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