NEW YORK TIMES
Media Struggling With Pressures to Report Unproven Allegations

aught in the Act": It was a banner headline that tabloid newspapers found too good to resist, a story that news organizations stretched their rules to run, a rumor that others tried to substantiate and finally could not. The allegation that President Clinton and Monica Lewinsky had been caught in an "intimate encounter" in the White House was one of the most titillating and potentially damaging tidbits to surface so far in the sex scandal.

Yet the media coverage of the allegation Monday ranged from hyperbolic to nonexistent. Many newspapers put the story on the front page - some inserting the startling qualifier "if true" - while others were silent on the subject. The sources invariably went unnamed, except when the charge was simply attributed to ABC News, which broke the allegation, so to speak, citing its own unnamed sources, on Sunday ABC This Week.

"We've evolved to the point where information is such a commodity that now it's not unusual for news organizations to say, 'Somebody else is reporting this, we don't know if it's true or not,' " said Tom Rosenstiel, the director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism, a think tank on press standards. "It really raises the issue of whether news organizations should report information they can't prove themselves, on the theory that the public would have heard about it anyway, or whether your newscast or paper should only contain facts that you know or believe are true."

In the week since the White House sex scandal arose, the media's handling of the allegations against Clinton has repeatedly illuminated the tension between the rules by which many journalists say they are governed and the demands of the marketplace for information in which reporters operate.

That marketplace has been transformed in recent years by such forces as the rise of the Internet and 24-hour, cable-television news, both of which have intensified the pressures under which news is gathered and accelerated the pace at which it is spread.

The conflict between the old rules and the new appears to be altering the standards news organizations use to determine whether to air a story - among them, the criteria governing what constitutes a reliable source and how far a news organization should go to find independent verification.

"There was a time when there was a kind of standard that most journalists lived by that you had to verify a piece of information about which you had no real knowledge with at least one other source, maybe two," said Bill Kovach, curator of the Nieman Foundation at Harvard University.

"But that day is gone in the competitive world. When Matt Drudge puts it up on the Internet and everyone in town is talking about it, it's difficult to resist at least trying to match what he's put out. So each judgment maker in each news organization is left to design his or her own standards."

In the case of the intimate-encounter allegation, Jackie Judd of ABC reported shortly before noon on Sunday simply that "several sources" had told ABC about the alleged encounter. Ms. Judd said it was unclear whether the alleged witnesses were Secret Service agents or White House staff members.

By early Monday, The Daily News and The New York Post had the story on their covers. "Caught in the Act," their identical headlines read. ("White House Disputes Story," The Daily News added.) Both papers attributed it simply to "sources," which they did not identify further.

The Chicago Tribune put the allegation in the second paragraph of its lead article on the case, giving as its source simply as ABC News. The third paragraph began with the caveat, "if true" and acknowledged that "attempts to confirm the report independently were unsuccessful."

The Washington Post attributed its version of the story to "sources familiar with the probe" being conducted by Kenneth Starr, the independent counsel. The Los Angeles Times credited "people familiar with the investigation" by Starr. The Wall Street Journal mentioned the allegation, attributing it to "a law enforcement official," in an article on page A20 of Monday's edition. The article referred to "unsubstantiated reports" that a Secret Service agent saw Clinton and Lewinsky in "an intimate encounter."

The New York Times came close to publishing an article about the allegation, then elected at the last minute not to do so. Joseph Lelyveld, the executive editor of the Times, said: "We worked very hard on this story, and in the end we weren't sure what was true."

There have always been occasional instances in which news organizations air information that they may not have verified on their own, Rosenstiel pointed out. For example, in wartime or in coverage of election returns it is not uncommon to see networks and newspapers citing wire service reports.

But the standard has been different when the networks and newspapers have the ability to try to verify a report on their own. In addition, Rosenstiel said, "The bar gets higher if you think, 'What are the consequences of publishing this information if it's wrong?' "

"It's a tough call," he said, of news organizations reporting each other's reports without independent verification. "I think there are times when you may need to do that. But what if this account turns out not to be true?"