TOM ROSENSTIEL: One of the things that sort of emerges from the totality of the study is the sense that much of the coverage was aimed at getting allegations into print. if you were technically covered, you played by the rules enough to say I've got sourcing, put this in the paper or on the air.

In the contemporary media environment, is that the best we can do? is it still realistic to think that our job is to publish the truth as Walter Lippman described it? To sift out the rumors and the innuendo from fact and to publish what I think Carl called the best obtainable version of the truth. Is that still a realistic...

CARL BERNSTEIN: That's a great point because what distinguishes tabloid journalism, is the urge to get something into print. The value not being whether it's true or not, but whether somebody has said it. And in the story, in the tabloids, and on the 24 hour news channels especially, we have seen those tabloid values. Whereas the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Newsweek, the Washington Post, the networks for the most part, have used their own reporters to see if something is at least verifiable or credible.

DOYLE McMANUS: On my side of the table, of the stodgy old newspaper side, there has been enormous pressure to get these allegations into print. It may be that the difference is we do it, the pressure comes not from lust but from fear. Where the tabloid may lust to get all this stuff into print, we worry about all these facts rolling around the countryside.

What is different today from Lippman's time is we could sort it out and never print the false and our readers would not be subjected to it. The problem we confront every day is if our readers have been bombarded by the exaggerated, the unfounded and the false, how do we correct that picture for them? That sometimes means publishing the fact of allegations that you then immediately have to say appear to be unfounded. It's a catch-22.

E.J. DIONNE: I think all stories involving Bill Clinton, either you end up having the word paradox or irony in them. In this case it's either a paradox or an irony that on the one hand his opponents have been very good at getting lots of allegations out there through the very process you're talking about.

Then we say to ourselves, gee, we've got to write about it because it's out there, even if only to knock it down. So on the one side that has happened and it's happened a lot. On the other side, I think, I've had Republicans tell me that they think the worst thing that happened to them is how many charges that were made against Clinton were untrue because it devalues the whole currency of a charge against Clinton.

QUESTION: Sometimes the spin of our sources gets into our stories. How do we as journalists guard against that and still report what Carl points out is the very valid fact that you need to get from anonymous sources things that actually happened?

GWEN IFILL: I think there's two ways. The best way is obviously trying to check it with another side, and this is one of the frustrations in this particular case. Betty Curry retrieved the gifts. Did she? No answer from the other side. Then a couple of weeks later, well, maybe Monica sent them back, well, buried somewhere else. You don't have the other side coming right back at you so you're stuck with this particular fact. However, I don't think that legitimizes putting it in there if you don't know that from Betty Curry, from anybody else, but somebody who wants to get a story out. And as I said before, I think if you have doubts that she actually retrieved the gifts or that that person is telling you the 100 percent accurate story, I think you have to characterize it for the viewer, for the reader, as coming from who it's coming from and why they're doing it. That's the only responsible way, I think, to do it if you don't have any other contrary evidence or the person themselves won't give you their side of the story.

BILL KOVACH: What about the characterization of the conversation as leading?

E.J. DIONNE: In most kinds of stories I think it's possible for the news organization to insist on look, we've got to say this comes from a Republican source or a critic of Clinton or a Democratic source. In a story like this, especially if leaks may come from some law enforcement agency or the special counsel's office, and I don't know if they do or not. It's much harder. That person won't agree to letting a reporter do that. So then the reporter's sitting there with a bad choice. Either report this story that you know or at least think you know to be the case without saying where it comes from, giving the reader a hint; or try to do that and risk not having the story at all, and that is the pressure on this story that basically your whole report is about.

BILL KOVACH: Is it your assumption that the source in that story insisted that the characterization, leading, be part of the story? Otherwise why use it? Why not let the conversation or the fragment of the conversation speak for itself and let the reader decide was this leading or was this not?

E.J. DIONNE: I'd like Carl to address this whole question, because you had to deal with sources where... Deep Throat is still not known. On a lot of that stuff we had no idea as readers of your stories where they came from or what the tilt of people was.

CARL BERNSTEIN: Interestingly enough, in our reporting the first few months, there were virtually no sources that were in investigative agencies. They all were primary sources who knew tiny little pieces because they worked for the Nixon Reelection Committee or in the White House.

I think 98 percent of the time spin is easily dealt with by good reporting. What you say is that after this story broke, Paul Bagalla or White House people were dispatched and they put the following interpretation on it. I think you can do that in most instances. I think it's obligatory that you do that.

But I think there's another question in this story because a big part of this story is Ken Starr, what are his motivations? I think there needs to be some reporting within the press on the question of are some of these stories coming from Ken Starr's office and why? It's a really tricky question because reporters ordinarily don't go around saying let's find out the source of the story. But the White House has made a serious challenge to the bonafides and motivation of the investigators here. I think we need to find a way to report on that.

The other thing is this whole question of leaks. I am very skeptical that there is anybody in Starr's office or elsewhere that is throwing wholesale information over the transom, laying this stuff out. My guess is that it comes from good, hard reporting where reporters are calling eight, ten, twelve people who they know, or maybe in the FBI who were on Starr's staff, who are on Starr's staff, and are getting tiny pieces. And lawyers for some of those involved, and they're getting tiny pieces and putting it together. That's my somewhat informed speculation but it also involves a little bit of knowledge.

QUESTION: I would ask the question of how far you all think the story has advanced in this last month.

DOYLE McMANUS: This story hasn't advanced, this story has retreated. (Laughter) We now know a lot more about the background and the challengeable voracity of people like Linda Tripp and Monica Lewinsky than we did on day one.

DOTTY LYNCH: I agree.

What I worry about, I talk to friends who read the paper and watch a little TV, and they know a lot more about this than I do. They have all kinds of facts in their head because they've read this in the paper and they're not sorting out where it's coming from and whether it's true, and November 15th was a start date and all this kind of stuff.

QUESTION: I just wanted to ask Doyle, something you said at the beginning is you said you think there is penalty for being wrong on this story, and I'd like to know what it is and whose paper is being punished?

DOYLE McMANUS: We can cite here two famous cases of publications that were wrong and that got written about with reporter's names and editor's names, for being wrong.

But the Wall Street Journal had to stand up in public and say it was wrong. The Dallas Morning News had to stand up in public and say it was wrong. There are two or three other examples that are still out there. One of them is the different ways, different newspapers and broadcast outlets presented the "fact" of a dress that was stained with DNA evidence. That "fact" has yet to appear, and when the journalism reviews come in, that dirty laundry -- forgive me for that -- I think is going to get a thorough airing.

CARL BERNSTEIN: I think there is a penalty, and that is that we have various communities and constituencies in our national polity in this city, elsewhere. I think the reputation of the Wall Street Journal and the Dallas paper on this story especially, has really been hurt. I think their credibility is in question in terms of future stories they do. I think ABC was hurt by its report. And perhaps a sense that they're out there a little too fast. So I think there is a price to pay.

E.J. DIONNE: I think the price is in our credibility and the price is measured by all of the polls that show what people think of us.

It's an interesting question of how much individual accountability there is. My sense is reporters who make a big mistake get berated by their editors for starters; and don't feel great around their colleagues; and in general the public holds us in lower esteem and trusts us less when we make highly publicized mistakes and I think everybody is aware of that.

BILL KOVACH:The question is, these organizations are embarrassed, but the entire press is penalized by that. I think that's what happens.

QUESTION: If we are in the 24 minute news cycle with no ability to verify sources, much less get double sources on something, much less get responses to allegations in the 24 minute news cycle, what specifically would you do in your newsrooms to fix it?

CARL BERNSTEIN: Why can't you get a response or hold the story until the next 24 minute news cycle?

DOTTY LYNCH: I have the same feeling. We have held the line on things. We may have been penalized, our ratings are not up, and we are considered way down in terms of Lewinsky coverage, in terms of people doing it, but we're holding the line.

We did one thing that the White House started to yell at us about and then they started to laugh. We waited two weeks to report that Linda Tripp had worn a wire when she met with Lewinsky, because we hadn't independently verified that for two weeks. I got a phone call first from somebody saying that's a two week old story, and then he started laughing and he said oh, but I guess you didn't verify it until today.

So you don't get a lot of credit and you get scooped a lot, but in the long run I have to believe that the credibility is what really matters.

E.J. DIONNE: When I covered the state government in Albany I had a wonderful editor called Shelly Binn. One day some story was floating around and it was a very negative story about somebody, and I went right through him what I had as fact and what I surmised and we were trying to figure out what to do with the story. Shelly said there are some occasions when it's better to be second. In that case it turned out the story wasn't true, and he was right. There are times when you have to make that decision. Now it's not easy in this environment. People don't want to be scooped.

But on a lot of these stories the incremental gain you get in being first is pretty small. In other words, some of the things on the Watergate story, some of these breaks proved very important, but there are a lot of these breaks, especially on a story like this, that may not be important in any historic way.

QUESTION: I heard from the panel that the two source rule has gone by the boards. What is the difference in quality between that story and the present story that say we've abandoned a two source policy?

BILL KOVACH: I'm not sure that the study says the two source rule is dead. I think in fact it says it's not dead, but it's not observed as diligently as it was in the past. Because there were a number of two source stories in this study.

CARL BERNSTEIN: The two source rule, which we used for good reason, is a pretty good thing for a reporter to have almost all the time. At the same time I can certainly envision a circumstance in which one source has a document or something that is irrefutable, or a fact and you know this one source for an awful long time in which you can use one source. I don't think that it's got to be an absolute standard. But certainly myself, I always feel a lot better when I know two people are giving the same version.

QUESTION: I agree with you. But it just seems much looser in this situation than it ever did in the Watergate situation.

CARL BERNSTEIN: I think that's true.

DOYLE McMANUS: It may seem that way in part because of the nature of this story. Let me cite what I think is the most important consistent use of one source stories here.

There is one document at the heart of this document, and that is the Monica Lewinsky tapes. A lot of the reporting going on has been reporters trying to contact people and they are in various places in the drama and in the city -- not only in the independent counsel's office -- who have access to those tapes. Now if you have a source with whom you have a long relationship who is reading to you, let us say hypothetically, from transcripts of the tapes, even if you had the tapes themselves, the tapes are only one source. That characterizes the real world dilemma here.

It is not only the number of the sources, it is not only the characterization of the sources, it is the quality of the information and the characterization of the information. You can take an allegation and if you accept everything your source says including the spin and the value judgments and the speculation and the hypotheses about where this may lead next that your source gives you, you've got one kind of story. If you take what your source is giving you and you say all right, I'm going to leave aside his notion of what this means and simply stick to a very careful presentation of what I truly know in a moral sense this source is giving me that is really there, then you may have a one source story, but it's a one source story that will stand up.

QUESTION: Is there any penalty for information (inaudible)? No matter how many sources you had, if you had three names sources on the record for a fact that isn't true. If it gets into all the newspapers, is there any penalty for everyone having (inaudible)?

DOYLE McMANUS: I'd argue the penalties are too low and too slow.

DOTTY LYNCH: I think the penalties are twofold. One is a big one, which is that a lot of readers and a lot of viewers don't believe any of this stuff, or anything they hear anymore. And the unwillingness to retract a story in any big way gets around in the journalistic community, and we love our competitors to be wrong. But the unwillingness, what Tom said at the beginning, to say what we don't know and to admit with some humility here, and also to not retract in any kind of big way when we are wrong I think is causing a big problem for us.

E.J. DIONNE: The Dallas Morning News actually deserves some credit for how publicly and quickly they pulled back. In a situation where people are reluctant to admit error, just as you say, they were amazingly out front in saying gee, we've got to pull this out.

DOYLE McMANUS: As was the Wall Street Journal.

QUESTION: But (inaudible) you admit you were wrong. If you don't admit you were wrong...

BILL KOVACH: You get embarrassed. Whether you're penalized is another question.

QUESTION: Exactly.

DOYLE McMANUS: The larger, the more important issue is all of those stories that took one step across the line, all of the stories about the dress that made the dress a little more real than it turned out to be, and is anybody going to come back around and write the pieces soon that the readers who read about the dress initially are going to see that number one, tell us what we do and don't know about the dress -- the Stout piece in the New York Times is a terrific example of what we need to be doing right now -- sorting out fact from semi-fact.

TOM ROSENSTIEL: One other thing I wanted to point out is that in the study when we say what's a named source. If somebody, if a reporter got a quote from the tapes, even if they didn't have the tapes, hadn't seen the tapes, if there was a quote that was in quote and attributed to Monica Lewinsky, that had to be coded as a named source. So that number may be slightly inflated if somebody took something out of [Newsweek] for instance and put it in the newspapers.

QUESTION: (inaudible) shortcomings the way the story has been reported. So will there be any chance the next time the media is faced with a story, or will we look back on this as the golden age of journalism? (Laughter)

DOTTY LYNCH: I just want to bring out, we haven't, none of us, addressed it enough, I think, is that some of what we've done have been strategies that have worked in the past to force a reaction from the other side and they haven't worked, and we've all gone crazy trying to figure out whether it's the carrot or the stick or what we're doing to get the White House and get the President and get Vernon Jordan and all those people to do interviews and to tell us their side of the story. Part of the justification of a lot of this, even if it's been messy and even if it's been harmful, has been to try to get the other side to give us the facts as they see them and try to get to the truth. So far none of us have been successful in doing that.

BILL KOVACH: That's a really interesting point, and it may be something that we ought to design some journalism workshops to discuss because in fact, beginning with the Reagan Administration, White Houses have learned that one way you keep a story from developing is not to comment. You can't keep it alive. If that's true, that requires a change in the way journalists work, but that change in too many cases seems to be speculation and judgmental reporting which is what I think the danger is.

In terms of what we've learned from this, personally I think the most important thing we've learned is that if the polls are to be believed, the American people have very clearly lived up to the founding fathers' belief that the conflict and confusion of a lot of competing opinions helps the public come to some judgment and they're waiting for that judgment to be made. They have not made a judgment yet. I think after the first four or five days here in Washington that the coverage in Washington began to ease off on its judgmental nature and to fall more in line with what the American public is seeing. But hopefully we'll have an opportunity to discuss questions like this more.

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