Washing Dirty Linen in Public

By Thomas Griffth

There comes a time when newspapers, so relentless in pursuit of wrongdoers in government, find that they have wrongdoers on their own staffs. It can happen anywhere; what matters is what the newspaper then does about it: Does it hush up the story, or go all out to report it?

In times past, any scandal reflecting on a newspaper might have been acknowledged briefly, if at all, back among the truss ads. But the best papers have learned from Watergate a lesson that officeholders in government are still learning: any attempt to cover up or to play down a scandal is apt to worsen it.

Just three years ago this month, the Washington Post had to admit that its Pulitzer prize-winning story by Janet Cooke about an eight-year-old heroin addict was a hoax. The scandal shocked editors of the Wall Street Journal, which put a squad of reporters onto the story and emerged with a tough front-page report ("Lessons for All Journalists").

It appeared two days before the Washington Post could publish its own thoroughgoing inquiry by its ombudsman (an independent critic), who judged the Post's performance "inexcusable." The Post admitted to squelching its own doubts when Cooke's story was first challenged. One of her superiors, Bob Woodward, reportorial hero of Watergate, said, "We went into our Watergate mode--protect the source and back the reporter."

Now it is the Wall Street Journal's time for scandal (see ECONOMY & BUSINESS). The Securities and Exchange Commission tipped off the paper that it was investigating handsome profits being made by investors who had advance knowledge of items written by R. Foster Winans, 35, that would appear in the Journal's widely read "Heard on the Street" column.

Determined to be first and fullest in reporting its own embarrassing story, the Journal assigned seven or eight reporters to it. Warren H. Phillips, the Journal's chairman and chief executive, said, "Our news management told them to cover it as they would any other company or paper. Just get it all out." The lengthy front-page story that resulted made melancholy reading, but was commendable for its candor. Winans may not have profited from the leaks, but a free-spending colleague, David J. Carpenter, who worked at the Journal for 18 months, might have. The Journal report was remarkably blunt: "The two are lovers . . . They live together, and Mr. Winans wears a gold ring given to him by Mr. Carpenter."

Journal editors were sufficiently concerned about the homosexual reference to try out another version of the story on colleagues, identifying Winans' companion this time as a female lover or spouse, just to see whether the relationship had been overstressed simply because homosexuality was involved. The editors concluded that the homosexuality had to be printed.

Besides, how would the Journal have looked later had another paper come out with "the real, untold story"?

The Journal did its own digging, under the direction of Managing Editor Norman Pearlstine. In an editorial titled "Dirty Linen," the Journalsaid that credibility is "our chief professional pride and one of our most important business assets . . . We are, of course, washing our dirty linen in public. This is precisely the action we have often recommended to others caught in embarrassing episodes."

The Journal does have a deserved reputation for tough maximum-disclosure reporting, though its politically conservative editorial page has not in fact been ardent in attacking what is now being called "the sleaze factor" in the Reagan Administration. The President has often gingerly defended his colleagues against attacks from the press as well as from the Democrats. Unlike the Administration, the press undergoes no such persistent, informed scrutiny from the outside. That is all the more reason for those in the press to consider themselves to be not white knights beyond reproach but vulnerable members of the human race.