Press: Is It Right to Publish Rumors?

Even though it has been 30 years since Allen Drury published Advise and Consent, the landmark novel of backstairs intrigue on Capitol Hill, its plot remains eerily contemporary. Against the backdrop of a brutal confirmation battle reminiscent of the John Tower nomination, the 1959 novel portrays an earnest young Senator who tries in vain to resist political blackmail over a homosexual encounter in his distant past. But the Senator is driven to suicide when he learns that an unsavory syndicated columnist is about to print the politically devastating charges. A fictional Washington Post executive explains haplessly that while no responsible paper will publish the scurrilous column, “some little paper somewhere will run it big as life, and then the wire services will feel they have to pick it up and send it across the country . . . And there we’ll be, trapped in our own operation.”

Public mores may have changed over the past three decades, but the press still finds itself trapped by the rituals that govern its coverage of scabrous gossip. Today the journalistic rules of righteous rumormongering have been liberalized, even though the results in the form of tarnished reputations often remain all too familiar. Leading newspapers and the television networks are less likely to permit the wire services to do their dirty work for them. Instead, the new, more permissive approach allows them to write and broadcast artfully crafted stories about the rumors themselves, thereby spreading calumny while piously decrying it.

During the spiritually enervating marathon that passed as the 1988 campaign, presidential candidates were forced to refute publicly rumors of homosexuality, mental illness, illegal-drug use and extramarital affairs. Yet the Donna Rice episode, following months of pious denials of womanizing by Gary Hart, can only have strengthened the public’s cynical suspicion that smoke inevitably signals an inferno of secret scandal. Hart’s dramatic downfall was an embarrassing spectacle, especially for all the journalists who missed the story. Pam Maples, a political reporter for The Rocky Mountain News in Denver, expressed a typical reaction: “This paper has tended to be very conservative about rumors. After the Gary Hart story broke, there was guilt here among some of the editors and reporters. You know, he was the hometown boy. The feeling was, Shouldn’t we have been doing that story?”

Presidential campaigns have never been an arena for the fainthearted: the awesome powers of the office may implicitly permit the press to waive normal strictures of taste and delicacy in the pursuit of rumor. But until recently, journalists tended to judge members of Congress by a more humane standard. It was not too long ago that a prominent legislator could be carried off the Senate floor in a drunken stupor without a word of his public intoxication appearing in the press. Such journalistic self-censorship certainly did little to promote sobriety among public officials, but it did help create an almost unimaginable era of political comity in Congress.

How sad and sordid, in contrast, is the current rule of rumor on Capitol Hill. Perhaps the nadir was reached with the recent press coverage of the baseless and base charges that House Speaker Thomas Foley is a homosexual. Syndicated columnists Roland Evans and Robert Novak initially helped stir the muck by referring to rumors about “the alleged homosexuality of one Democrat who might move up the succession ladder.” As the gossip oozed along the halls of Congress, New York Daily News columnist Lars-Erik Nelson published the details of the whispering campaign against Foley in order to finger the staff of Congressman Newt Gingrich as one of its sources. Never mind that the Foley rumors were completely false. Once the Republican National Committee launched its own smear campaign against the new Speaker, using sniggering language like “out of the liberal closet,” virtually every news organization felt compelled to repeat the slur, regardless of the damage it would cause.

After participating in Foley’s ordeal by innuendo, few journalists could claim that theirs is a higher calling than ordinary occupations. Thus how tempting it must be for armchair analysts to decree that henceforth no responsible publication or newscast should disseminate unsubstantiated rumors. But while preserving the dignity of the unfairly maligned, would such a high- minded standard also serve the public interest? Or are current journalistic practices — as unfortunate, unfeeling and unfair as they sometimes appear — necessary reflections of subterranean currents in contemporary government and politics?

It is difficult to invent a system under which the press can operate on a higher ethical plane than the politicians they cover. Rumor has always played a role in politics, but rarely have the backstage operatives been so adroit, and so cynical, in their use of vitriol. The nation is mired in a poison-pen era, and to identify the culprits, the press must sometimes inadvertently mar reputations. The role of journalism is, in part, to delve beneath the surface and explain the causes of events. To do otherwise is to cheat the public, the only constituency to which reporters owe their allegiance.

This is not to diminish the rights of Tom Foley — or any other public figure similarly tarred. All too often the press is unnecessarily timid in describing the character of rumors. Using tepid language like “unsubstantiated” or “believed to be without foundation” to describe malicious falsehoods can suggest to the uninformed that there may be a kernel of truth to the charges. If there is absolutely no evidence to support a scurrilous rumor other than the fact that prominent politicians are spreading it, far better for the press to resort to a four-letter word that can fit in any tabloid headline: lies. Only through such aggressive honesty can the press sidestep the muck that is replacing real issues in contemporary American politics.