Investigations: The Busybodies on the Bus

Society's busiest busybodies are in the press, where, under cover of the Constitution, they expose, scold and ridicule public figures, and sometimes win Pulitzer Prizes for it. In the putative national interest, reporters have taken on the roles of mother superior, party boss, neighborhood snoop and cop on the beat. No one knows exactly what the moral code is, but anyone who runs for office, or otherwise pre-empts public attention, violates it at his peril.

We do know, however, that in its police function the press relies less on the Constitution than on the Ten Commandments, although not all of them. "Thou shalt not steal" is much less interesting than "Thou shalt not commit adultery." Until recently, the cautious public figure searching for a baseline against which to measure his conduct could look to the Gary Hart scandal of 1987. Roughly translated, the Hart standard meant that the conduct in question had to be verified, reckless, substantial and current, by a candidate running for President. The challenge Follow Me was optional.

Then came former Senator John Tower of Texas, who was rejected as Secretary of Defense in part for decades-old, unverifiable boozy womanizing. As for drug use, the other major area of press scrutiny, Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas provides the most current guide. It is no longer disqualifying to have smoked marijuana as a student, especially if it was an experiment and was not enjoyed. Anyone who smoked in Vietnam actually scores points with the press.

But the hurdles change often: as competition for advertising spins out of control, the mainstream press is increasingly willing to feed lower on the news chain. This spring NBC News anchor Tom Brokaw, slumming as host of a prime-time show called Expose, dusted off a seven-year-old story alleging that Virginia Senator Charles Robb had spent an evening at a hotel with a former beauty queen and attended parties where drugs were used. Once it knew that Brokaw was going with the story, the Washington Post, which had decided against running it before, took the clothespin off its nose and played the story on the front page.

Brookings Institution analyst Stephen Hess likens the lowered standards to "a tabloid-laundering operation in which respectable news organizations get into a story through the back door by reporting on a tabloid's reporting on a story." The value of Brokaw, a respected pro who wins journalism awards and dines at the White House, in such a cleanup operation is high. In April, Brokaw sanitized the use of the name of the alleged Palm Beach rape victim in the William Smith case under the guise of reporting on the ethics of a supermarket scandal sheet, which had used the name first. This purified the issue sufficiently for the New York Times, which ran a lurid profile of the woman the next day, violating most of the newspaper's rules about printing unsubstantiated charges from unnamed sources and naming victims in rape cases. Other publications, which would not take their cues from a tabloid but which felt noble taking them from the Times, followed suit.