Technology alters journalists' job (02/11/98)
Martha T. Moore, USA TODAY
It was one of the more laborious moments of uncovering the Watergate scandal: Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein were trying to discover who checked out a book from the Library of Congress.
You remember the scene from All the President's Men: the camera moves back to show the pair in the cavernous main reading room of the library, searching through thousands upon thousands of book request slips. It took the two of them an entire afternoon back in 1972.
"I remember the drudgery of that day very well," says Bernstein, currently a consultant for CBS News. "Today, I just asked somebody at CBS to do a search on an individual for me, and I've got not only everything that's ever been written in the press about this person, I've got (the record of) the sale of his house. . . . I couldn't believe it."
Welcome to the Web, Woodstein.
The basics of reporting the story of President Clinton and an alleged affair with a former White House intern are just like reporting Watergate: a journalist and a source meeting somewhere and whispering.
"It's still about how good you are at reaching somebody, how good you are face to face, and how good you are on the telephone," Bernstein says.
But that's about the only thing that's the same in unraveling the two stories of possible presidential obstruction of justice:
The technology available to the media today is so different from technology available during Watergate that it has become part of the story. As Bernstein has discovered, digging for background is a lot faster on the Internet. More important, on-line newspaper editions and 24-hour cable news channels have obliterated the news cycle, increasing exponentially the opportunities to get the story out - and to get it wrong.
"If there was ever a case of too many reporters chasing too little news and trying to catch up with the ability of too much technology to transmit their information, this was it," says Stephen Hess of the Brookings Institution.
The nature of the journalism involved is different, too: investigative reporting then vs. reporting on an investigation now.
For the early stories on Watergate, The Washington Post and other news organizations were running something akin to a police investigation. They developed their own leads and followed them, learning most of their information directly from the people who worked on President Nixon's re-election campaign and even from the burglars themselves. In many instances, the reporters were ahead of the official investigators.
Looking for leaks
That's not the case for much of the Interngate reporting. True, Michael Isikoff of Newsweek has pursued the story for more than a year, and his magazine says it has heard tapes in which Monica Lewinsky allegedly describes her affair with Clinton. But now it is lawyers involved on all sides of the investigation who know what the probe is producing. And reporters are trying to get independent counsel Kenneth Starr's staff, lawyers for Lewinsky and grand jury witnesses to tell what they know. It's the difference between talking to an eyewitness and talking to the cop who interviewed the eyewitness.
"What we did in Watergate was original reporting. It was not based on information from prosecutors," Bernstein says. "It was based on going to the people who worked for Richard Nixon in his White House and in his campaign, and finding out what had happened and who was responsible and that indeed there was a coverup going on."
Watergate began with a small event - a burglary June 17, 1972, at the Democrats' national headquarters - that was just one manifestation of a larger conspiracy by the Nixon White House. Woodward and Bernstein - and reporters at other newspapers, including The New York Times, Newsday and the Los Angeles Times - were digging into Watergate even before there was an official investigation. When that investigation stopped - on orders from the White House - the media kept digging. When the Senate took up its own investigation, Sen. Sam Ervin, who led the probe, turned to reporters for information, not the other way around.
Woodward and Bernstein linked the burglary to the White House long before a grand jury did - and had to endure public skepticism as well as furious White House denials. The Post, for example, wrote in September 1972 that former Attorney General John Mitchell controlled a GOP slush fund used to finance spying on Democrats - seven months before Mitchell testified before a Watergate grand jury and 18 months before he was indicted for conspiracy to obstruct justice. The story was based on interviews with campaign employees. It was confirmed by a source within the federal investigation into the burglary, according to Woodward and Bernstein's account in All the President's Men; it didn't originate there.
Getting word out
How stories get out to the world has also changed radically. The press pack is much bigger and it moves much faster.
ABC News reporter Sam Donaldson says he "just happened" to have a camera crew outside the Justice Department on Oct. 20, 1973, when he spotted Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus. The now-famous Saturday Night Massacre had just taken place: Ruckelshaus told Donaldson he'd resigned and so had Attorney General Eliot Richardson.
But the ABC camera was loaded with film, which unlike today's videotape must be developed before it can be used on air. Nor was there a satellite truck standing by to send the news live. So Donaldson did the only thing he could do: "I called it in on the telephone." And to do that, he had to run back to the Justice Department press room. The cell phone he carries now hadn't been invented.
In fact, entire continents of the media landscape didn't exist in 1974:
Cable television was just beginning. There were no 24-hour cable news networks to run stories instantly.
Unlike Donaldson in 1973, television reporters today can go live anywhere at any time. Cheap and abundant telecommunications satellites allow cable and broadcast networks to dispatch crews at will to transmit stories. PBS was able to supply a crucial Jan. 21 interview with President Clinton to other networks within minutes of its conclusion. Hordes of local and overseas television crews can flood into Washington for a big story like this one and beam their reports back home.
The press pack has grown enormously in the past 25 years. This newspaper didn't exist back then. Syndicated tabloid-TV shows like Inside Edition, Extra and Hard Copy, which cover sex scandals in Washington as they do ones in Hollywood, have sprung up. Those new outlets have forced the press to move faster and cover political peccadilloes that they once might have ignored. That makes for a lot of cameras.
"If we had a stakeout at that time, as we had at the Watergate, at John Dean's house, the stakeout would be three cameras," says Daniel Schorr, who covered Watergate for CBS.
Even 25 years ago, major newspapers kept an eye on the competition: The New York Times and The Washington Post wired one another a photo of the next-day's front page at about 11 each night. But in the past few years, Internet sites for newspapers have become common. Now anyone with a computer can read tomorrow's newspaper tonight.
Even newsgathering, as Bernstein discovered, has been transformed by computer databases. In 1973, there was no Nexis, the electronic clippings library that is consulted thousands of times a day by newspapers all over the country.
Nor were there portable cameras that could shoot inexpensive videotape to produce images, crucial for television, of suddenly famous people. Monica Lewinsky has been captured on home videotape at her high school prom and school play and in news footage of her now-famous rope line hug with the president.
"None of that tape sheds any light on the primary issue here, 'Is she telling the truth?' " Village Voice media critic James Ledbetter says. "But the existence of it makes for great television."
Hurry up and wait
The news cycle, as a result, runs 24 hours a day. Before the Internet and all-news cable networks, there was almost always a delay - from a few hours to an entire week - before the next opportunity to publish information.
On the morning of March 23, 1973, Judge John Sirica read in court a letter from convicted burglar James McCord that blew open the White House coverup. Donaldson, like other reporters, ran for a pay phone.
But the network chiefs didn't break into regular programming with the story. "I remember distinctly that I did nothing (on the air), he says. "I didn't run out in front of the camera like the Wolf Blitzers of today."
The McCord letter was soon on the radio. But now, such an event would also be covered live on cable news stations, hit Internet news sites as soon as a story could be written and then make the evening news, Dateline, 48 Hours, Prime Time Live, Nightline and the Internet editions of newspapers - all before hitting the doorsteps in a printed newspaper the next day.
Even newsweekly magazines have freed themselves from their daily or weekly cycles. Newsweek held its original story on the allegations of an affair between Clinton and Lewinsky. As a result, it was beaten by The Washington Post and others on Wednesday, Jan. 21. So the magazine leapt back into the fray the next day by publishing a special story on line, and by having its reporters and editors spend hours on camera on MSNBC, CNN and even David Letterman's late-night show.
Today, Donaldson, CNN's Blitzer and others make continual live appearances each day. "It's ultimately better. The quicker news is disseminated - you can't make the case that it should be withheld," Donaldson says. "The downside is the obvious one; there isn't the time to be reflective or to apply a lot of editorial thought."
Shaky ground
The combination of the two - secondhand sources and speedy publishing - is creating journalism that is sometimes shaky, or worse.
"The more the reporters cluster around a single story, the more there is herd journalism, and a heightening of almost frantic and hysterical desire not to be beaten," press critic Ben Bagdikian says.
The most recent example: last Wednesday, the Wall Street Journal posted a story on its Web site asserting, based on anonymous sources, that a White House steward had testified before the Whitewater grand jury that he had seen Clinton and Lewinsky alone together. Less than three hours later, the story was revised to say that the steward had spoken to the Secret Service, rather than the grand jury. Monday's Wall Street Journal carried a complete retraction: the steward testified he did not see the president alone with the former intern.
Faster isn't always better, apparently, when it comes to scandal reporting.
"Regardless of your medium now, you are responding to the fastest thing available to your audience," Ledbetter says. "That is directly attributable to the advance in technology, but it's not an advance in reporting."
By Martha T. Moore, USA TODAY
©COPYRIGHT 1998 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Co. Inc.
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