Defenders of the Los Angeles Times are claiming that the paper wasn't showing bias when it enthusiastically pursued last-minute "Gropegate" allegations against Arnold Schwarzenegger - saying the Times did the same thing to President Clinton when it published womanizing allegations against him in late 1993.
However, the two reporters responsible for the Clinton report say Times editors had to be dragged kicking and screaming to cover accounts from Arkansas state troopers who said they procured dozens of women throughout the 1980s for the then-Arkansas governor.
In fact, Times editors were so reluctant to cover the story that they forfeited their own paper's bombshell scoop to the American Spectator.
Right from the start, when Times reporters Bill Remple and Douglas Franz approached their editors with sworn affidavits from four lawmen saying they'd been used to solicit sex for Clinton, they met nothing but resistance.
When first apprised of the "Troopergate" bombshell, for instance, Times Washington Bureau chief Jack Nelson insisted that the story needed further corroboration. He recommended that the lawmen take lie detector tests.
The two reporters told author James Stewart that Nelson's boss, Los Angeles-based Times managing editor Shelby Coffey, agreed, saying that "the story would not run without [lie detector] test results." [In its initial report quoting the six women who accused Arnold, the Times made no mention of any polygraph tests.]
In his 1996 Clinton scandal tome "Blood Sport," Stewart writes that Remple and Franz sometimes worried that their bosses would do anything to kill the story - including sabotaging their work.
The investigative duo, for instance, kept editor Nelson in the dark as long as they could about Troopergate because, according to Stewart, "There had been concerns in Los Angeles about possible leaks to the White House, and a sense that the [Washington] bureau was too close to the Clintons."
One unnamed L.A. Times editor came up with another road block - "a long list of questions, some highly technical, such as whether a particular camera mentioned by the troopers had the capacity to capture images at the distance mentioned." It did, noted Stewart.
Reporter Franz was "so angered by all the obstacles that were being interposed by his own editors that he ran a red light and was ticketed."
When the Spectator issued a press release touting its own upcoming Troopergate scoop in the midst of the Times' footdragging, Remple and Franz "were furious."
"They could see the White House strategy all too clearly: stall if the story couldn't be killed, make sure the Times was scooped by the right-wing, easily discredited Spectator.
"But when their complaints reached [managing editor] Coffey," writes Stewart, "he said, 'We'll go when we're ready. We will not be rushed by the Spectator.'"
In the end, the Times held the story till the day after the Spectator hit newsstands - handing the White House just the ammunition it needed to discredit the report.
According to freelance reporter Jill Stewart, who tracked the Times' coverage of last week's recall election, the paper's editors showed no such caution when it came to going after Schwarzenegger.
"I counted not fewer than 24 reporters dispatched on Arnold, and this entire enterprise was directed by [Times editor] John Carroll himself," Stewart said yesterday. "Carroll launched the project with the words: 'I want a full scrub of Arnold.'"
Read more on this subject in related Hot Topics:
California Governor's Race
Media Bias
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