Investigations: The Busybodies on the Bus

By MARGARET CARLSON

Society's busiest busybodies are in the press, where, under cover of the Constitution, they expose, scold and ridicule public figures, and sometimes win Pulitzer Prizes for it. In the putative national interest, reporters have taken on the roles of mother superior, party boss, neighborhood snoop and cop on the beat. No one knows exactly what the moral code is, but anyone who runs for office, or otherwise pre-empts public attention, violates it at his peril.

We do know, however, that in its police function the press relies less on the Constitution than on the Ten Commandments, although not all of them. "Thou shalt not steal" is much less interesting than "Thou shalt not commit adultery." Until recently, the cautious public figure searching for a baseline against which to measure his conduct could look to the Gary Hart scandal of 1987. Roughly translated, the Hart standard meant that the conduct in question had to be verified, reckless, substantial and current, by a candidate running for President. The challenge Follow Me was optional.

Then came former Senator John Tower of Texas, who was rejected as Secretary of Defense in part for decades-old, unverifiable boozy womanizing. As for drug use, the other major area of press scrutiny, Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas provides the most current guide. It is no longer disqualifying to have smoked marijuana as a student, especially if it was an experiment and was not enjoyed. Anyone who smoked in Vietnam actually scores points with the press.

But the hurdles change often: as competition for advertising spins out of control, the mainstream press is increasingly willing to feed lower on the news chain. This spring NBC News anchor Tom Brokaw, slumming as host of a prime-time show called Expose, dusted off a seven-year-old story alleging that Virginia Senator Charles Robb had spent an evening at a hotel with a former beauty queen and attended parties where drugs were used. Once it knew that Brokaw was going with the story, the Washington Post, which had decided against running it before, took the clothespin off its nose and played the story on the front page.

Brookings Institution analyst Stephen Hess likens the lowered standards to "a tabloid-laundering operation in which respectable news organizations get into a story through the back door by reporting on a tabloid's reporting on a story." The value of Brokaw, a respected pro who wins journalism awards and dines at the White House, in such a cleanup operation is high. In April, Brokaw sanitized the use of the name of the alleged Palm Beach rape victim in the William Smith case under the guise of reporting on the ethics of a supermarket scandal sheet, which had used the name first. This purified the issue sufficiently for the New York Times, which ran a lurid profile of the woman the next day, violating most of the newspaper's rules about printing unsubstantiated charges from unnamed sources and naming victims in rape cases. Other publications, which would not take their cues from a tabloid but which felt noble taking them from the Times, followed suit.

Reporters in Washington held their collective breath last week wondering who, if anyone, would perform the laundering service for the vicious story in a gay magazine claiming that a Pentagon official is homosexual. The Los Angeles-based Advocate tried to get publicity for itself by offering an advance copy of the piece to major news outlets that would agree to run it. Although the individual has not been antigay or hypocritical or done any of the other things gay groups use as excuses for "outing" people, Jack Anderson broke the story in his syndicated column, deciding that being first was better than being right.

The Washington Times last week lobbed a pre-emptive strike against Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton, warning that his private life will be fair game if he decides to run for President. The main inspiration for the paper is political gadfly Robert ("Say") McIntosh, a Little Rock restaurateur known as the "Sweet Potato Pie King," who is trying to stir up trouble for Clinton in Arkansas, handing out rumormongering leaflets.

In the world of moral shakedown, all sources -- bored beauty queens who want to be models, models who want to flack for No Excuses jeans -- are unimpeachable, and no sexual charge is too old or trivial to pass up. If the country loses the candidacy of one of the nation's most successful Governors to moral terrorism, the press may yet come to see that there is more to journalism than moving product, no matter how heated the competition. But so far, with only slightly fewer correspondents assigned to the alleged Palm Beach rape case than to the Moscow summit, there seems no end to busybodying in sight.

Few would argue for a return to the John Kennedy standard, where reporters enjoyed nudging each other over the President's affairs but didn't feel the public had a right to know. For the President, the standard must be high: there are no off-hours, and wars can start in the middle of the night. But there is a moral statute of limitations, a sense of proportion, that still applies.

Not every aspiring candidate who has his picture taken with his wife puts his sexual history into play. The public looked at Hart's egregious pattern of conduct and, understandably, had qualms about what it revealed about the man who would be President. Hart, after all, flaunted his affairs and taunted the press to expose him. But the specter of the press pursuing the issue of whether Robb got a massage or something more from the former Miss Virginia, as if there were a Pulitzer at stake, makes the public wonder why the reporters aren't off sorting out the savings and loan scandal. Who among the busybodies can know what really happens behind a closed door, inside a marriage or in the human heart, or what it means? Uncovering an affair a public official may have had tells us that he's not perfect. But not much more.