The following teaching notes accompany Internet Journalism and the Starr Investigation. Both are scheduled to be published in the fall 2000 by Columbia University Press.

By J.D. Lasica

Synopsis

Most journalism students today have grown up using the Internet as an important way of receiving news. They are likely unaware of the various stages of its development and may accept current practices as the only possible way of communicating. This case was designed to help students think through the challenges the Internet created and the choices journalists have made.

Use of the Internet slowly broadened from use by the technologically savvy to use by the general public as a form of communication. According to public opinion surveys, as late as 1997 only 37 percent of the public went on line, but by the summer of 1999 half of those questioned reported having used the Internet (Tom Rosenstiel and Bill Kovach, Warp Speed [New York: Century Foundation, 1999], p. 11).

The eight-month investigation as to whether President Clinton had had a sexual affair with a 24-year-old intern was a central force in the Internet’s coming of age. When Matt Drudge broke the news of the Starr investigation in January of 1998, Internet news was still in its infancy. Broadcast television, newspapers, and magazines-old media-drove the often inflammatory coverage. By the time the Starr report was released eight months later, the tables had turned: the Internet largely dictated how the story played out, and online news organizations responded with respectful, restrained, serious coverage. And by then the role of individual “cybermongers” like Drudge seemed to have faded.

The Starr investigation jump started an industry that had been slow to embrace the ethos of the Net. At latimes.com, the posting of live updates from the impeachment trial and the more frequent use of multimedia news sources established practices that were among the legacies of the Clinton Lewinsky story. “One of the side effects of the scandal was the impact it had on the way we do things on the site,” says Matt Stodder, online politics editor. “Just as the space program raised the level of technology in different areas of society, the scandal raised our competency level in dealing with audio, video, interactivity. It enhanced our proficiency in covering other major stories, like the Yugoslavian war and 2000 presidential election.”

But in addition to the positive attributes of the Internet, enhanced speed and depth of reporting, the Internet poses challenges to journalists in meeting some of the most basic responsibilities of journalism: truth, accuracy, and fairness.

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Continued | Back to The Starr report

Because of the Internet, when a major story breaks, people now tend to go online. On the day the Starr report swooped into cyberspace, news sites saw their online usage surge. A poll by the Pew Resarch Center for the People and the Press found that the public turned to Internet sites in large numbers as a news source during the scandal. Journalists should be heartened by the knowledge that online users gravitated to the major national news sites: MSNBC, CNN Interactive, USAToday Online, nytimes.com, washingtonpost.com.

But they should not be smug or complacent about their role in cyberspace, for millions of users accessed the report directly — without the filter of the news media. A few years ago such a document could only have been conveyed to the public by reporters. Now it was instantly available to anyone with an Internet connection to read, dissect, forward to others, debate in an online forum, or print out and share with friends and neighbors.

Online columnist Katz says he received 25 or 30 copies of the report that people had e-mailed to him within a span of five minutes. “This was the first time in American history that millions of citizens were given access to a critical document at the same time as their elected representatives and the news media,” he says. “People reached their own conclusions about the document fairly quickly, without the Washington press corps, the pundits and Beltway politicians telling us what to think. People in positions of power have been rattled by the Net because they sense they’re losing control over the civic agenda. The Net spreads the agenda-setting around.”

More than ever we need journalism for analysis, interpretation, synthesis and context. Few of the millions of users who perused the report online read the full 445-page document. Fewer still read the hundreds of pages of supporting materials. In a time-deprived world, readers still look to journalists to divine the significance of news events, to fact-check and vett the material for accuracy and hidden agendas, to put events into perspective, to lift the curtain on the inner workings of government to get at the truth.

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Continued | Back to The sourcing problem

On September 9, 1998, the House of Representatives received special prosecutor Starr’s report. The report — formally titled Referral From Independent Counsel Kenneth W. Starr in Conformity With the Requirements of Title 28, United States Code, Section 595(c) — was a document without precedence in U.S. history. It contained graphic accounts of Clinton’s affair with Lewinsky and alleged that the president had committed perjury, obstructed justice, tampered with witnesses and abused his constitutional powers. The report laid the foundation for Clinton’s impeachment by the House along party lines in December 1998; he was acquitted in his Senate trial two months later. Two days later, the House voted to release the report — on the Internet — and for one improbable afternoon and evening, the Net had the spotlight all to itself.

In the online melee that ensued, journalists scrambled to get a copy — but so did millions of ordinary Americans. Congress had made no provisions to handle the crush of traffic at the three official government Web sites posting the report. Its servers were hopelessly jammed. To compound the problem, legislative techies had posted the 445-page report in a clunky format that required users to download the entire document without being able to peek at its contents.

Then, at 2:45 p.m., CNN.com became the first news site to post the report, beating the competition by 15 minutes because of “good connections inside the Capitol,” says Scott Woelfel, general manager and editor in chief of CNN Interactive. By midafternoon, the free-for-all was in full swing. CNN.com’s front page was getting 300,000 hits per minute. MSNBC reported 1.94 million visitors that day, a record. Across the entire Web, traffic was up 175 percent over the previous day. All told, 20 million Americans read parts of the report online within 48 hours of its release.

The release of the Starr report was widely seen as the single most important event in the history of the Internet up to that point. “The real milestone of the Starr report,” Woelfel observes, “was that if you weren’t on the Net, you felt like you were missing part of the story.”

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Continued | Back to Revisions on the fly

During press coverage of past scandals such as Watergate or Iran-Contra, perhaps the biggest challenge facing journalists involved news gathering: teasing out enough information from reluctant sources for a solid story. In the Clinton sex scandal, information flowed like water. It was everywhere, but much of it was murky or polluted. The real challenge came in filtering the information to sort out fact from rumor. Authenticating the news became critically important in two ways:

• News organizations covering the story first-hand had to determine the reliability of the information obtained from sources with politically tinged motives (many participants had Republican ties and had a strong, visceral hatred of President Clinton from the outset of his 1992 presidential campaign) as well as from sources in the independent counsel’s office who were using the press by selectively leaking information to gain tactical advantage with reluctant witnesses such as Lewinsky. Reporters and editors worked out these calls based on their experiences, news judgment and gut instinct.

• News organizations, especially those from small and medium-size markets, had to wade through the digital datastream pouring through the newsroom from outside channels each day to decide what to publish. The difficulty was that even established news providers like the Wall Street Journal and Dallas Morning News were stumbling, while newcomers like cyber-columnist Drudge seemed to be wired to some reliable — if ever-anonymous — sources.

In the Clinton-Lewinsky case, editors had an especially difficult time determining what was fit to print. They were often troubled by the endless leaks and constant parade of unidentified sources, particularly when they had to rely on the judgments of other news organizations. A study commissioned by the Committee of Concerned Journalists found that in the early stages of the Starr investigation, 21 percent of the reporting was based on anonymous sources and almost half of those stories were based on one source only.

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Continued | Back to Internet journalism and the Starr investigation

According to news accounts, the sequence of events involving the Wall Street Journal report unfolded as follows: Shortly before 4 p.m. on Wednesday, February 4, 1998, Joe Lockhart, the White House deputy press secretary, said a Journal reporter approached him for a reaction to accusations that a White House steward had once seen Clinton and Lewinsky alone in a study next to the Oval Office. The reporter said he needed the information quickly because the paper planned to publish the story on its web site. Lockhart said he and the reporter agreed that Lockhart would get back to the reporter within 30 minutes unless the reporter paged him to say he had less time. A few minutes later, the reporter paged him to say the story had already gone up on the Wall Street Journal Interactive site.

The Journal’s online story reported that Bayani Nelvis, a White House steward, had testified before Starr’s grand jury that he had seen Clinton and Lewinsky alone together. The story claimed the steward “found and disposed of tissues with lipstick and other stains following a meeting between Mr. Clinton and Ms. Lewinsky,” and that he had recounted the episode to the Secret Service because he was “personally offended” by it. The report was attributed to “two individuals familiar with” the steward’s testimony. Within minutes after the story was posted, the paper’s Washington bureau chief appeared on the cable news channel CNBC — the Journal’s new television partner — discussing the scoop. His remarks were later picked up by MSNBC and posted on the MSNBC web site.

Less than 90 minutes after the Journal first posted the story, Nelvis’s attorney issued a statement calling the report “absolutely false and irresponsible.” Late that afternoon, the Washington Post and other news organizations sought to verify the original allegations, but the Post said its sources close to the grand jury strongly denied that Nelvis gave any such testimony.

At 6:40 p.m., the Journal posted a revised version of the story in which it added the strong denials from the steward’s lawyer, who had originally refused to comment when the Journal was preparing its initial report. The softened story contained a second change as well: The steward reportedly spoke to Secret Service personnel, and not necessarily the grand jury, about what he had seen. Meantime, both the original report and revised version had flashed to news outlets across the country.

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