INQUIRING MINDS WANT TO KNOW: IS THIS STORY TRUE?

The supermarket tabloids don't usually pay much attention to politics--they have their hands full chronicling Sharon Stone's love life and following Madonna around with a camera--but when they do, they make it count. In 1987 the National Enquirer printed a photo of Donna Rice sitting on Gary Hart's lap, creating the most infamous visual epitaph for his crashed political career. Four years ago, the Star ran a story on Gennifer Flowers' alleged affair with Bill Clinton, throwing a major scare into his campaign just before the New Hampshire primary. And last week it was the Star's sensational account of Dick Morris' alleged trysts with a call girl that prompted the President's top political strategist to resign.

It also prompted another round of soul searching by the mainstream media. Once again the nation's major networks and newspapers were forced to follow the tabloids' lead, pursuing a story they felt uneasy with, unearthed by a publication many regard with disdain. They were wary, not just of the story's source and tawdry sexual details but of its timing. The Star's scoop was first made public on the very day of President Clinton's acceptance speech, in a front-page story in the New York Post, a newspaper owned by conservative media mogul Rupert Murdoch. (Murdoch once owned the Star too, but he sold it in 1990 to the company that also owns the National Enquirer, its chief competitor.)

The story highlighted an ongoing journalistic culture clash. Supermarket tabloids operate by different rules from most of the mainstream media. For one thing, they relish the sort of steamy subject matter (especially sex) that other publications shy away from; for another, they frequently pay money for stories. Star editors admit they paid 37-year-old prostitute Sherry Rowlands for her details of the alleged trysts with Morris (the amount was "under $50,000," they say). Yet they insist that the transaction did not make them any less confident of the truth of her allegations. In this instance the Star gathered enough supporting evidence to satisfy most editors--though the way they got it would probably make many blanch.

According to Star reporter Richard Gooding (a former metro editor for the New York Daily News and the New York Post), Rowlands first contacted the tabloid "out of the blue" in mid-July and told them she was a call girl who had been seeing Morris. Gooding was initially unimpressed, he recalls, telling her, "If it's simply a story of a presidential adviser hiring a call girl, it's probably not a story." After several more conversations in which she divulged more details and showed him her diaries, Gooding and his editors grew considerably more interested.

Was Rowlands steered to the Star by Republicans out to embarrass Clinton? "Obviously it's not impossible," says editor in chief Phil Bunton. "But we saw nobody else's fingerprints on this story but hers." One thing that made him doubt any political motives was her naivete. Rowlands didn't know what jobs Clinton aides like Leon Panetta and George Stephanopoulos held, and had misspelled their names in her diaries.