"We discovered through the unraveling of a source that we had messed up," laments Ralph Langer, editor of The Dallas Morning News. "We had a bad procedure for vetting sources out of the Washington bureau."

On Sunday, January 25, ABC News reported there had been a witness to an intimate encounter between President Clinton and Monica Lewinsky in the White House. On Monday, the Morning News reported a similar story, quoting both ABC and a "White House source." In the first edition of the Tuesday morning paper, the News fleshed out the story: A Secret Service agent had seen President Clinton and Lewinsky in a "compromising situation" in the White House, and the agent had agreed to cooperate with special prosecutor Kenneth Starr. "This person is now a government witness," the paper quoted its source. A second source confirmed the report.

Within minutes, The Associated Press picked up the story, adding the fruits of its own investigations. "We had been working on the ABC report all day Monday, but had no luck," says the AP's Washington bureau chief, Jonathan Wolman. "But we didn't just pick up the Morning News's story. We added quotes from senior officials of the Secret Service saying they'd investigated the report and had doubts about it. And we had David Kendall, the president's personal lawyer, calling it 'false and malicious.'"

The qualifications were appropriate. Even as the Dallas paper's first edition hit the streets, the primary source of the story called back saying he had got it wrong. In the ninety minutes between the first and second editions, Langer pulled the story. An urgent retraction was posted on the paper's Web site. The AP quickly issued the much-hated "Bulletin Kill" to its members, but that was too late. Many had already printed the piece, and had to wait for the next day to carry the AP's follow-up explanation.

The Morning News's blunder was easily identified. "We require two independent sources [on major stories]," Langer explained, "and an editor has to know who the sources are." So far, so good. While the Tuesday story quoted only one source, a "Washington lawyer familiar with the negotiations," the paper actually had another that it did not reveal, and even a third on a "tell me if I shouldn't print this" basis, according to Langer. When the primary source backed out, Langer checked the second source. He found that source had thought he was confirming the vaguer story the Morning News had carried on Monday, not the more specific Tuesday version.

As all this unfolded, the Monday editions of the New York Post and the New York Daily News splashed identical front-page headlines, caught in the act. Each quoted only "sources," without further elaboration. The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times ran similar reports from their own sources. The Wall Street Journal did the same. Of course, there is no way short of a public unmasking to tell if all these publications' sources were separate individuals or the same (busy) people talking to all of them. Meanwhile, on television newscasts, the story lost its qualifications, drifting toward a concreteness that still had not been justified.

The Morning News, strangely enough, later insisted that its original story was mainly correct, and that the mistakes involved only "nuances." "We thought we had two sources saying a Secret Service agent was negotiating for access to Starr, had gotten it and had talked to Starr's camp," Langer says. "Our source bailed out because it was a 'former or present agent' Ñ a nuance, and, second, the negotiations to get this person to Starr were complex, and mediators were involved. The basic facts of a Secret Service agent, past or present, being put in touch with Starr was correct." But Langer also downgraded the "compromising situation" of Clinton and Lewinsky to an "ambiguous" one Ñ a much more important shift.

Darrell Christian, AP managing editor, says the changes, especially the less damning description of the position Lewinsky and Clinton were caught in involved more than nuances. "When they [the Dallas Paper] withdrew the story and said those details were inaccurate, we thought we had no choice but to take it off the wire."

As cjr went to press, no news organization had been able to confirm any part of the story beyond doubt. No present or former agent had been named. No journalist had claimed direct contact with him or her.

So, Langer was asked, is the story true? "Tough questions. I can't personally answer. People in a position to know are saying it is true, and I don't think they're making it up."

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