The day after Salon published a report claiming that Representative Henry Hyde (R-Illinois) had a five-year affair with a Chicago beautician 30 years ago, the offices of the San Francisco-based webzine were under siege.
A malicious torrent of "black faxes" took the office fax out of commission, employees believed the mail server and Web servers had been hacked, and then the bomb threat came in.
It was the response of editor David Talbot's to flak from one of his own writers, however, that has put Salon back in the news. The Hyde story, and the brouhaha that surrounded it, drew 400,000 additional readers to the site. In the opinion of Jonathan Broder, Salon's former Washington bureau chief, however, the story should never have been published.
Broder's statements to that effect to a Washington Post reporter has resulted in a parting of the ways. Talbot accepted Broder's resignation, saying Broder had made an agreement not to publicly air his criticisms of the story. In The New York Times, Talbot blasted Broder's statements as "a fundamental violation of the trust that any organization must have in its employees."
In offloading Broder, the ambitious, buzz-hungry publication loses one of its big guns. It was Broder and Joe Conason's coverage of billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife's "Arkansas Project" to trash Clinton by funneling US$2.4 million to conservative *American Spectator * magazine that triggered a federal investigation.
It was Broder, with co-author Murray Waas, who reported eyewitness allegations that David Hale, the key witness against Clinton in the Whitewater investigation, was also on Scaife's payroll.
And it was Broder who asked "Where's Whitewater?" when the Cigar Report was published on the Web.
Wired News spoke with Broder about the decision to publish the Hyde story, the effect of the Net on news coverage, and about the state of President Clinton's soul on the Jewish Day of Atonement.
Wired News: What line did you feel Salon crossed by publishing the story about Henry Hyde's affair?
Broder: A very old one. In dealing with stories of this nature -- private lives and public people -- you have to ask yourself three questions. Is there a public issue involved? The answer to that question is no. This woman was not on Hyde's payroll, she wasn't a foreign agent, she didn't give a news conference announcing the affair the way Gennifer Flowers did, and she didn't slap Hyde with a sexual misconduct suit the way Flowers did. There was no public issue.
The second question you have to ask is, is there any hypocrisy there? Is this the case of a man who is publicly moralizing about Clinton's sexual behavior while he himself has the same problem? Unlike Helen Chenoweth or Dan Burton, Henry Hyde has maintained a gentlemanly silence about this. There was no hypocrisy.
The third question is relevancy. The affair happened 30 years ago. The story failed to pass muster on all three of those standards. Therefore, I thought it was not fair to publish it.
__WN:__What was Salon's motivation for publishing it?
Broder: You have to ask David Talbot that. I would go and look at his editorial that accompanied the piece. I didn't agree with it. That's the one that said, "Ugly times call for ugly tactics." My jaw dropped when I saw that.
What helps Salon justify the publication of the story is a broad-brush approach to everyone in Washington: that all Republicans are hypocrites, and all inside-the-Beltway journalists are corrupted. I beg to differ. When you attack someone personally -- as this story did by going after Henry Hyde -- you have to assess him individually, what he did and didn't do, and whether there's a salience to what's going on now.
All we have is our credibility. "Ugly times call for ugly tactics" -- "ugly tactics" is not a phrase that I associate with credible journalism. Tactics is something that political operatives use toward an end.
I did a story that outlined the "doomsday scenario," the veiled threat by close allies of President Clinton that there will be a scorched earth of sexual disclosure if the Republicans dare to go down the path toward impeachment. That's an ugly tactic. As a journalist, you report about ugly tactics, you don't use them. That smacks of an agenda. That's the line that was crossed [by Salon].
WN: Years ago, people would talk about how the Internet was going to establish a level playing field. Politicians and celebrities would be on the same level as ordinary netsurfers, voices in the same chat room. Do you think the scrutiny of the president's life could have happened without the direction that society was already moving in, with the Net's help?
Broder: The Web has accelerated that invasion of privacy, but in the same way that television accelerated it. It's just another media eye. As it opens an eye on President Clinton's personal life, it opens another eye on reporting from the field in Kosovo. We now know about the massacre that happened there virtually instantaneously. Everything is telescoped. Clinton's life is just another thing that the Internet eye focuses on, scoops up, and disseminates to everyone. We're living in a world now with a gigantic intercom system, like families have, or a giant security camera in a bank that's always on.
What you put out there depends on how you want to define your publication, whether you want to be credible and responsible or want to be a publication that just creates buzz. Buzz can result from a credible story, or from a discredited story. Yes, it's titillating. You can appeal to the prurient side of the reader, and paint everyone with a broad brushstroke.
WN: Today is Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement. If you could send an email message to President Clinton today that you knew he would read, what would you say?
Broder: I'm not his priest. He's a grown-up. He has to look at what he's done, and the effect that it's had on his family, and on the country, himself. It's like The Old Man and the Sea, when the old man goes out there, way beyond where anyone can help him, to deep water. He struggles out there, and catches the fish, and brings it back. But as he brings it back, the sharks -- which represent the Fates -- eat it. And all he's left with is a skeleton. He's broken, but he's not defeated. That's where Clinton is now.
