Stakeouts And Shouted Questions

In the most famous play ever written about newspapermen, Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur painted a sardonic portrait of hard-boiled, hardhearted journalists, but it was a picture tinged with affection for the profession's raffish charm. Last week, however, many people found nothing charming about the press's role in the collapse of Gary Hart's presidential candidacy. If no one actually peeped through keyholes, reporters were doing things that couldn't help looking a bit tawdry. A team of journalists staked out a man's home to discover who was spending the night there. A presidential candidate was asked, at point-blank range, whether he had ever committed adultery. TV newscasts and newspaper front pages were dominated for most of a week with talk of sexual dalliances, back doors and yachts to Bimini. Along with the questions that flew last week about les liaisons dangereuses of Gary Hart, a parallel debate was raging over whether the press had overstepped the bounds of propriety in trying to bring those indiscretions to light.

Most of the debate focused on the Miami Herald, which had set Hart's downfall in motion by conducting a 24-hour weekend stakeout of his Washington town house and finding him in the company of an attractive young woman. In his first public response to the Herald's charges -- delivered, appropriately enough, before a convention of newspaper publishers meeting in New York City -- Hart blasted the paper's surveillance and said it raised "searching questions" about journalistic responsibility. Much of the public seemed to agree. The Miami Herald's own opinion survey showed that 63% of its readers felt that press coverage of Hart's personal life had been excessive. Reporters looking for Hart's alleged paramour Donna Rice at her rented suburban Miami condominium early last week discovered instead a band of angry neighbors. "Oh, you press!" snapped one woman. "You're always getting into everybody's bed."

Journalists themselves were divided over the Herald's decision to stake out Hart's home on an anonymous tip. "The notion was to put a citizen under surveillance," says Bill Kovach, editor of the Atlanta Journal and Constitution. "To me that is a technique for police, not journalists." A.M. Rosenthal, former executive editor of the New York Times, criticized the Herald's tactics in his op-ed column: "I would not have given such an assignment or allowed one to be made." Yet a Times editorial called the Herald's pursuit of the story "eminently justified," and many others agreed. "I would have done the same thing if I got the tip they did," says David Hall, editor of the Denver Post. "Watching the man's movements, which can be done legally and with discretion, is the only way you can learn whether Hart is telling the truth about himself."