GWEN IFILL, Chief Congressional Correspondent for NBC News, talked about the dangers of an ever speeding news cycle and opining instead of reporting: There are five issues which are basically driving this story. I want to touch on each of them briefly. I remember in the first campaigns I covered in '88 and then in '92, we were all bemoaning the 24 hour news cycle and how stories were always bound to change. In fact Bill Clinton got elected and remains buoyant today because he could always count on getting through a day at a time, and that the story would change just enough or not change at all that he could either take advantage of it and exploit that 24 hour news cycle, or use the 24 hour news cycle to kill a story.

It's now a 24 minute news cycle, and it's one that newspapers have gotten involved in as well as the 24 hour networks, so everybody is competing with each other. I have to say I am baffled in many cases why newspapers go for the Internet web site way of leaking news or reporting news rather than just waiting until the next day's newspaper in the good old fashioned way. It seems like it guards against a lot more surprise and mistakes.

The second point is that in spite of all of the drama that we have been engaged in on this story, it still at its heart remains a story about perjury and obstruction of justice. We have, most of us resisted the notion to turn this into entirely a sex story. I think that at the heart of every story that has written or reported in the major responsible news media, you can still see the question which is being raised which is did the President lie, did the President try to stop someone's investigation?

Number three is what we don't admit often enough which is what drives our interest in this story and what keeps this story alive is what we know but we can't report. That is, we show a lot of restraint about things that we suspect and things that we have heard over the years but we wouldn't dream of putting in print. There has been enough smoke that you just cannot dismiss these allegations out of hand. It doesn't mean you put the smoke in the paper at your first opportunity. It doesn't mean that you say, well you know, I did hear ten years ago about this woman, let me go knock on her door. It doesn't mean you do that, but it means that it informs your thinking. As a human being, as a reporter, you're not going to dismiss everything you've ever heard or smelled -- the smell test -- about a story, and then not pursue it. The line, of course, becomes making sure you pursue it and nail it down before you put it in the public domain.

Number four is that we as journalists should try to resist making the same mistakes that our critics make when it comes to confusing the things we do. There's straight news reporting, there is informed analysis, there is mere punditry. I heard Oprah Winfrey the other day saying she's not [the news] media, but people have gotten these things all confused in their minds, and we help them by not drawing the lines quite clearly enough.

What Carl defends as excellent reporting is true. It is excellent reporting. But then the next line is informed analysis. People who know that the President's in big trouble because they have been talking to people.

But then there comes the next layer which I'm afraid we have a lot of, which is people who haven't made a phone call, who haven't talked to anybody, who have no sources, but who, however, have access to a live television camera and can say well you know, in my opinion. Well you know, my mother's opinion might be important in this case, but we wouldn't consider her a journalist or an informed opinion.

The other thing that we should keep in mind [is that] America hates the story [but] a lot of what has formed public opinion about this story is not us. The entertainment industry has raced past us. They took the story. Every night Jay Leno says these allegations are true. He then makes a joke about them, and then he sends the signal, this isn't important, and people are reaching far more [of their] conclusions based on that kind of information. It's our job to remember that at the heart of it there is still a question of lying, obstruction of justice, legal questions, impeachment. It's our job to let that inform our thinking. So it doesn't mean that we should stop and think oh, my goodness, maybe we're doing the wrong thing by covering this story. Clearly, we're not.

BILL KOVACH: Gwen mentioned something, E.J., that I'd like to organize a question for you around since you're somewhat detached from the story. She talked about the problem for Washington journalists dealing with what they know but can't report about a subject. I've heard journalists in Washington say that the undertone of "he's guilty, we all know he's guilty," that I see in some of these stories, results from the fact that this reporter believes the President deceived this reporter earlier in the story on Jennifer Flowers. And having been deceived once, is now angry and knows things that can't be reported. But it colors the report and may account for what the study finds, that the first assertion is he's in big trouble, before the reasons he's in big trouble are stated. You begin with a conclusion and then talk about a problem that led you to that conclusion.

Is this a new kind of judgmental reporting that occurs from too much knowledge that can't be shared with the public?

E.J. DIONNE, Washington Post Columnist, talked about how Clinton's personal history and his history of dealings with the press shaped the press' reaction to the breaking story: There is a history to these stories; that when this came out initially the first impulse was to believe, not to disbelieve, or not to suspend judgment. Bill's point about past dealings with the President on this subject goes right to the point. Howie Kurtz, the press critic of the Washington Post wrote a long piece about this.

I think two other things push this story along real fast. One, reinforcing the sense that something was going on was the initial reaction of the White House. I think there's a reason why, as the report says, there was a tendency to move very fast to big conclusions in the first week. That's because the White House itself seemed shell-shocked. And the President's decision, which may be very rational from his point of view both politically and legally, not to give an alternative account to what was in the news, A, made the story more believable to a lot of people; and B, set off this process which fed the story of looking for one little bit of data after another. If there were a coherent account of this story, you wouldn't need the New York Times story on Betty Curry. You wouldn't need the Washington Post story on what Mr. Fox, the former Secret Service agent said. You'd have the account in front of you. Because you don't have the account, there is this quest for more detail.

But we've got to go back to the very start of this study. Matt Drudge didn't give this story the decisive push. Ken Starr, the special prosecutor gave this story the decisive push. This story took off when the news broke that Mr. Starr was investigating President Clinton on these charges. At that point no matter how squeamish you are about sex stories, it became major news because it had taken what had been a sex story and turned it into a legal story that threatened the President.

A lot has been said about the press enjoying sex stories. Certainly the press and television enjoys the higher ratings that stories involving sex create. I think in this story the sex and the legal issue are inseparable. If he committed perjury it goes to whether he had a relationship or not. So you can look entirely legitimate and report an awful lot about sex because you're still... That's where the issue comes down.

But the very history of President Clinton's experience with this I think paradoxically shows that the press really isn't crazy about these stories. In fact some conservative press critics have said we've underplayed President Clinton's sex life.

I just want to close with two points identifying with some of the things that have been said. I think Dotty's point about anonymous sources is very important because we do often rely on anonymous sources but usually, and especially during political campaigns, we try very hard to give readers some sense of where this comes from.

I think on a story like this it's much harder to identify where all your sources come from, but I think it is important because this has become such a political battle between two sides.

Ironically, the study suggests that in some cases stories based on anonymous sources fared better as reality than stories with named sources. That's because often the stories with named sources don't provide information. They make broad statements such as "The President will be impeached." It turns out those kinds of speculative stories are much less to be relied on that stories based on information.

The problem is that in this story there's a lot of stuff that is sort of information, that falls into a very nebulous category. What do Linda Tripp's tapes really mean? They are information in the sense that they exist. We believe they are real tapes made of a conversation between Linda Tripp and Monica Lewinsky, but we really don't know yet how to judge the content of those tapes. They have shaped our coverage. We are dealing with a limited number of facts and an awful lot of things that may be facts that we suspect are facts, but aren't quite facts yet by our conventional definitions.

BILL KOVACH: If there is a history, with the journalists in Washington covering the stories, of something going on with Bill Clinton does that knowledge justify the judgmental nature of the reporting that went on in the first days? I use as evidence the widespread use of the word "scandal" which to my definition and I think to the dictionary's definition, is a judgmental word.

Does that bother any of you, or is it just me, or the prudes out there who read these things?

GWEN IFILL: It's funny. When I worked at the New York Times during Jennifer Flowers, the New York Times was, on a scale of 1-85, zero in terms of wanting to cover the story.

Even when I was at the Post and the Housing and Urban Development drama was unfolding, we were forbidden from using the word "scandal".

The difference in this story especially in television because I think that more newspapers have withheld the use of that word and television never hesitated for a moment, is because of the potential for the enormity of a story like this. I think a lot of the rushing to judgment that Bill describes that seemed to happen in the first week was because of the unprecedented nature of an independent counsel with the blessing of an Attorney General appointed by the President who was being investigated saying yes, this is a fair area of inquiry. Once all of these things have happened that have never happened before, which have the potential for at least extreme humiliation and down the road legal action, I think the desire to withhold the use of the word became much weaker.

BILL KOVACH: I guess my question is, is it the journalist's role to make a judgment? Or is it the journalist's role to tell me as a consumer what's going on, what they know?

CARL BERNSTEIN: That's a really good question. During Watergate, and in fact to this day, I have never in print or otherwise referred to Watergate as a scandal. Never.

I think that indeed the story here, to some extent, is about a sex scandal. One, it takes place in this celebrity culture that we live in today in which Clinton is, and again I'm going to make a distinguishing line here between the New York Times and the New York Post, but in which Clinton is, in a way, the ultimate celebrity, and this story reaches in its basic way into questions about sex. About Paula Jones, about Katherine Willy, about Monica Lewinsky.

So I think in terms of what the pejorative use of sex scandal is... You see a duck and all that stuff. This is a duck.. (Laughter)

DOTTY LYNCH: We're calling ours "Clinton White House Under Fire" which is a little more neutral. But the broader part of the story, and I think beyond the sex, as Gwen said, is the perjury and obstruction of justice issues.

E.J. DIONNE: I think it's a good question. I think one, the word "scandal" has been devalued almost as much as the word "gate" which has been completely devalued.

I think President Clinton's interview with Jim Lehrer and then the subsequent interviews where the denial seemed so carefully hedged, just like some of the others that we had become used to, that that helped give credibility to the story and people started writing that. They didn't say we know this to be the case, they simply compared that denial to other denials in the past, and that may not, in fact, justify the use of the word "scandal" but it did create a sense in the minds of a lot of people covering the story that there probably was something going on here. I think those first few days shaped the coverage for some weeks to come.

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