'Troopergate' attorney defends role in allegations against President Clinton p. 15

By: Robert Buckman

THE LITTLE ROCK attorney representing the Arkansas state troopers who last December charged President Clinton with sexual improprieties while governor told a journalism convention that he still believes he did the right thing in making the allegations public although he said he was stunned by the media coverage of himself.
Cliff Jackson, a one-time friend of Clinton, appeared on a panel discussion entitled "Drawing the line on reporting: how far should the news media go?" at the Region 12 convention of Society of Professional Journalists in Little Rock.
Appearing with Jackson on the panel were Jeff Eller, deputy assistant to the president; Skip Rutherford, a Little Rock advertising executive and Clinton confidant; Jon Brummett, a political columnist with the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette and Clinton critic, and Bob McCord, former senior editor of the old Arkansas Gazette and now a commentator for KTHV-TV in Little Rock.
"It was a difficult decision for me to represent the troopers," Jackson said, "because I knew the White House would make me an issue."
Jackson said that women and sex were not what the "Troopergate" story was about, and said that as early as 1991 he had refused to respond to questions from the media about Clinton's alleged womanizing.
He said that he set a personal standard for what conduct warrants public scrutiny.
"The bond I set for myself was essentially this: Does the conduct that was alleged affect governance?
"I don't think you can stop there. You have to ask what conduct does affect governance. If there's a charge of sexual harassment, I think it affects governance.
"When these state troopers came to me, everything they told me was substantially above the bar that I had set."
The troopers, among other things, accused Clinton of having used them to help procure women and having them stand guard while he had sex in a limousine.
Jackson had orchestrated the release of the allegations to the media shortly before Christmas. Under terms he had arranged, the Los Angeles Times was to break the story on a Sunday, while the American Spectator, a conservative monthly magazine in Washington, was to hit the stands the following day with an in-depth story by David Brock.
Jackson told the audience of journalists that the Times, which had two reporters working on the story for months, delayed publication "for political reasons, and that concerns me."
He said, "It was a journalistically sound story. There was no reason not to go with it. These reporters should have had a scoop and I felt sorry for them because they had worked so hard, only to have the White House call the editor in chief of the Los Angeles Times and the publisher and basically to cow them into not going forward with it."
Asked what he had expected to happen as a result of the allegations, Jackson replied, "I knew I would be an issue, but I didn't anticipate the intense interest in me, with the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Washington Post and the New York Times all zeroing in on me, and then all the national [television] magazines. I turned them all down.
"So for me, I'm not sure it's been worth it, because I don't think I was bargaining for that. But in terms of getting the issue out there, I think it was important. I still think it's important, but I don't think we're at the bottom of it. I think more will come out that will corroborate what the troopers have said."
Eller complained that there have been no media standards regarding the private lives of public officials since Gary Hart was asked if he had ever committed adultery.
"The lines changed dramatically that day, and there is now no standard," he said. "There is virtually no story that is off-limits in terms of the press' view of how the story should be covered."
Eller warned that the intense scrutiny of private lives will cause a decline in the quality of people who seek public office.
"I'd like to go back to the old standard of, do their personal lives affect their jobs?" he said. "If it does not, then it should not be considered relevant and it should be private."
Rutherford added, "If there are lines out there, they are established by the individual media outlets."
Although he is a Clinton critic, Brummett denounced what he termed the increasing use of rumors and innuendo in news reporting, citing the unfounded allegations of a cover-up in the suicide last year of White House counsel Vince Foster.
"When I first got into journalism, the great editors were the ones who set very high thresholds for news," Brummett said.
"They could define legitimate news, they could define the propriety of a story, and the great power in the newsroom, the great power in the community, was the tough old editor who made you answer every question and who did not let junk get into the newspaper."
McCord, a Clinton sympathizer and a former national SPJ president, also bemoaned the direction that news reporting is taking.
"The mainstream press has overflowed the banks and is going off, in my opinion, in all directions and has very serious portents for the future of the American press," McCord said.
"I'm one of these old-fashioned newspapermen who have high respect for things like balance and restraint, source-checking, those sort of things, and in this day and time, we're suddenly being introduced to piling on, to 'gotcha' journalism, to the idea that we'll print anything about the personal lives of the president and his wife, things that happened 13, 14 years ago that have absolutely no relevance to what's going on today."
McCord criticized the media coverage given to the state troopers' allegations, calling them "beyond the comprehension of people who have lived here in Little Rock and watched the Clintons for so many years. I find it very troubling."
McCord blamed the economic pressures of competition among the media, coupled with a decline in interest in reading, for the trend toward sensational coverage of the private lives of public officials.
He also faulted the younger generation of "baby-boomer" editors and reporters who went into journalism "as a means of obtaining the power they think they are entitled to," adding, "Newspaper people of another generation went into this business for another reason."
Buckman teaches journalism at the University of Southwestern Lousiana in Lafayette, where he is SPJ faculty adviser.