The 'Fortunate Son' brouhaha

By: Ellen Liburt Big scoops, little skepticism

Like Matt Drudge before him, Salon.com Editor in Chief David Talbot and his Web site touched off a major controversy by being first.
On Oct. 18, Talbot made a fateful phone call. He rang up St. Martin's Press because his online magazine had received a press release and an advance copy of "Fortunate Son: George W. Bush and the Making of an American President," which revived the persistent but unproven allegation that Bush was arrested for cocaine possession in 1972, but had his criminal record expunged through a Republican judge friendly with his father.
"Our feeling was once a major, reputable publisher like St. Martin's goes out with a book like this, with explosive allegations against a presidential front-runner, then that to us is news," said Talbot. He wanted to interview James H. Hatfield ? the book's author, whose most notable previous work is an unauthorized biography of "Star Trek's" Patrick Stewart ? and Thomas Dunne, editor of the eponymous imprint behind the book.
Salon's staff posted a story the day they received the book detailing its provocative allegations. The response to the posting was immediate: The site became the epicenter of a media uproar.
Out on the campaign trail in Phoenix, George W. denied Hatfield's charge. His father followed suit the next day in a statement from his Houston office deploring, among other things, the author's use of unnamed sources.
The Bush denials made the story more newsworthy. But the major force driving the story remained Salon.com, which continued posting skeptical reports about St. Martin's and Hatfield.
It was Dallas Morning News Reporter Pete Slover, however, who broke the story that Hatfield was a paroled felon who had served five years of a 15-year prison sentence for paying a hit man 5,000 dollars to kill his former boss with a car bomb.
When Hatfield was confronted with his past by St. Martin's, he insisted it was a case of mistaken identity. After conducting its own investigation into the charges, the book publisher recalled "Fortunate Son" Oct. 22.
How did the traditional news media respond to Salon.com's reports and the press release that accompanied the book?
According to Managing Editor Stuart Wilk, The Dallas Morning News first ran "a couple of very discreet references to the book, but nothing on the book per se." The secret of the 513,000-circulation daily's subsequent scoop was simple, said Wilk. "Pete found the information through routine reporting. ? I don't know that anyone else looked."
At The Associated Press, it was also "Journalism 101," as Washington Bureau Chief Sandy Johnson called it, but of a different school. "We didn't do anything the day we became aware of the book, Oct. 18," Johnson said. "We decided not to do anything based on extensive reporting we did, including interviewing the author. Next day, President Bush issued a statement. Because he's a former president, we felt that his words carried some weight we couldn't ignore. We did a 200-word story with the president saying it never happened. On Oct. 21, we did a story about the publication of the book being suspended while the publisher resolved questions about Hatfield's background."
But AP reporters had already resolved a number of questions about the press release and the book's afterword the day they received them. "We talked to a guy in the Houston area, Carol Vance, who was DA at the time of the alleged arrest in 1972," said Johnson. "And he said there were no Republican judges serving then, and he also said that there was no procedure in Texas at that time for expunging arrest records. That didn't exist until 1977. He also said that cocaine possession would have been a felony at this time, requiring the suspect to be taken to jail, fingerprinted, and posed for mug shots. There would have been four law-enforcement agencies and a justice of the peace who had a record of it. And of course, none of this exists."
Did AP consider moving the story? "It's always a question when you have allegations of this nature," Johnson said. "The Associated Press is the world's largest news-gathering organization. One of the issues for us is that people are watching what we do. And if we had put the material out there, it would have instantly elevated the credibility of Hatfield, which we chose not to do."
How did the Los Angeles Times approach it? "Very carefully," said Deputy National Editor Tom Furlong. The paper's coverage consisted of AP's story quoting former President Bush defending his son, a Washington Post piece reporting that promotion and sales of the book had been halted, and a final news piece by a Times staffer when the book was recalled ? all of which ran inside.
"We had heard that [drug] rumor," said Furlong. "There was an e-mail that had been sent out to many papers." (Amy Reiter, a Salon columnist, wrote about the allegations it contained in August. In the afterword, Hatfield credits her column with giving him the idea for his last, unplanned chapter.)
"We checked [the e-mail] out as best we could and found nothing to confirm it," Furlong said. "We did this several weeks ago. That's where it sat until this book came out, which alleged that it confirmed something we had already checked out. We looked at the stuff on the Internet ? I think it was Salon, or maybe Slate ? that ran stories on this. We looked at them carefully and we didn't go over old ground, but we were starting to look at ways that we could confirm the story.
"At that point," Furlong said, "everything hit the fan and we decided not to write about it until George Herbert Walker Bush released a statement defending his son.
"The fact is that we would never, ever publish a story like this, about him, unless we had the story nailed from about five different directions," he said. "We were all very suspicious that some guy could've checked with three anonymous sources. That didn't pass the smell test. If our best reporters can't confirm this, how's this guy who writes a science fiction book going to do it?"
The Arizona Republic published two front-page stories on George W. and his alleged drug arrest before running three more debunking the first. "In our case, it happened in Phoenix," explained Reader Advocate Richard de Uriarte. "Gov. Bush denied it here. It was a reputable magazine, and a reputable book publisher.
"I just see this as all of us slipping into the fear of missing a story, the fear of not being aggressive," he said. "I think I'm critical of the trap all of us are put in to run these stories all the time ? before we have them nailed."
As for Salon.com, Talbot said: "In our haste to put up the first story, there was too breathless and unskeptical a tone. ? And some of that was due to the speed of the Internet. We went up so quickly we didn't even have at that point a denial from the Bush campaign, which we got shortly afterwards and put into the story."
But, he said, "we felt it wasn't enough simply to report on the book's allegations but [that we also needed] to subject the author and the publisher to some scrutiny, which Salon did, along with the Dallas paper.
"We broke the news that it was the same Thomas Dunne imprint that had been forced to withdraw a controversial biography of [Joseph] Goebbels when it was discovered that the author was a Holocaust revisionist. ? We also broke the story that there was something suspicious about Hatfield's r?sum?, that he claimed he'd won an Isaac Asimov Foundation award that no one had heard of.
"So I take pride in the way that Salon aggressively reported the story. And I fault the rest of the media for its lethargic response. If Salon and the Dallas paper had not taken this book seriously and ultimately undercut its credibility, the book would have become a best seller."
De Uriarte, whose paper's response was anything but lethargic, looks back in his reader-advocate column from another
perspective: "My concern is that newspapers are increasingly ceding our news judgment to other media, especially the Internet, whose standards of accuracy, fairness, and verification are different than our own and sometimes nonexistent. The public senses this: It complains we're becoming like the tabloids.
"No one at The Arizona Republic ? not one reporter or editor ? knew the identity of J.H. Hatfield's sources. We didn't know who Hatfield was. We only knew about the book through an article in the online magazine Salon."
(Editor & Publisher WebSite:http:www.mediainfo.com) [Caption]
(copyright: Editor & Publisher October 30, 1999) [Caption]