Tom Rosenstiel, Vice Chair of the Committee of Concerned Journalists, opened the day with the release of a content study following up an earlier one on coverage of the Monica Lewinsky-Bill Clinton story.

"On February 18th, we released a quick study of what had been reported in the first week of the Lewinsky story. There had been so much criticism that the press was out of control, we wanted to find out what had actually been reported and what was the sourcing. In that report, we found that a large percentage (40%) of what the public perceives from the so-called "serious press" isn't reporting as much as commentary. We also found . . . secondarily, that almost half the reporting from anonymous sources was from a single anonymous source (41%).

"To follow up, this time we wanted to look at three new questions. One, to what extent are we telling readers and viewers who these anonymous sources are or what axes they might have to grind? How different was the tabloid press from the serious. And has the coverage calmed down over those first few days...

"The results: First, we are not very careful about how we characterize our anonymous sources.

If you take the category of fairly blind characterization, that is sources said, a source said, a source told me, the news organization has learned -- basically no other characterization of the source other than we have a source, that accounted for 60 percent of all the statements attributed to anonymous sources.

"If you take the category of sourcing that described the bias or allegiance of a source, (that would be a friend of the Clinton's, a source close to Staff, Linda Tripp's lawyer, something that describes the relationship and the allegiance of the source), only 17 percent of the time was a bias of an anonymous source characterized.

"... About 13 percent of the time, some professional association of the source is described. In other words a White House source, a Capitol Hill source, a Justice Department source, a lawyer involved with the investigation, something that told you how that person would have access to this information or some information, but didn't describe much more and didn't tell you anything about which side, if any, they were on in the story.

"...The three days we studied in March were picked in advance. It just so happened one of them was the day that the Clinton deposition broke in the Washington Post which ... caused us to expect that the level of anonymous sourcing would have spiked upwards because of that... Or the level of at least reporting attributed to other news organizations would have spiked upward because it was a huge break in the story that did not have a named source for it. And potentially that the level of analysis might have gone up since that was a complicated leak that might have required some analysis to help readers or audiences understand its meaning.

"Despite the moment that we captured in the second part of the study, we did find that the level of commentary...was lower in March than it was in the first week of the story. And the level of named sourcing was higher. All this would suggest there has been a pulling back in how aggressive the press was in relation to this story.

"The third thing we did was compare the so-called serious press to the so-called tabloid. We compared Hard Copy, Geraldo, Inside Edition, the National Enquirer, the supermarket Star, and the New York Post in the tabloid category, and found that when it came to source characterization, the tabloids were actually more specific than the mainstream press. When we talked to some people who worked in those organizations they told us privately that there was a good reason for that, and that was they had a lot of experience with lawsuits and one of the things they'd learned was be very scrupulous about attributing your sources. So an interesting lesson there. I'm not sure it's a defense necessarily of the tabloids, but there may be a lesson perhaps for the mainstream press.

"... One question, I guess, that occurred to us as we were putting this thing together was, have we ceded too much power to sources in terms of dictating the terms of how we describe them?

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