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In Reporting on Whitewater, an AnonymousSource Misinformed the PressBy Gilbert CranbergWatchdog ConferenceSavvy newspaper readers know to be on guard wheninformation in stories is attributed to anonymous sources.But what if a news organization relies on an unidentifiedinformant and withholds that fact from readers? The publicthen is robbed of a precious opportunity to be skeptical.A glaring case in point: Whitewater.The 1996 prosecution of James and Susan McDougal byIndependent Counsel Kenneth Starr featured testimony byFBI agent Michael Patkus. According to news stories at thetime, Patkus testified that nearly $50,000 of a fraudulent$300,000 loan from David Hale to Susan McDougal wasdiverted to benefit the Whitewater Development Co., i.e.,the Clintons. The “fact” of a tainted $50,000 benefit to thePresident dogged him thereafter in the press and became amajor focus of attention in the Whitewater saga.One small problem: There was no such testimony byPatkus. [For a detailed description of how major newsorganizations wrote “carelessly, or incompletely, or justplain falsely” about the facts, see “Getting It Wrong onWhitewater,” Nieman Reports, Winter 1997.]In a nutshell, the so-called nearly $50,000 benefit to theWhitewater Development Co. was in two chunks. One chunkdid not come from the corrupt $300,000 loan, nor did Patkussay it did despite press reports to the contrary. It came fromanother, apparently legitimate, bank loan to James McDougala year earlier. The second chunk was only briefly inWhitewater’s name and did not benefit the Clintons.So how did news organizations come to put words inPatkus’s mouth? They did it, I’ve recently learned, becausethey gave credence to what they were told privately by Starr’sdeputies about the so-called benefit during the 1996 trial.This information was then incorporated into stories withoutinforming readers that anonymous sources were at work.More than two years later, Starr himself went public withthe same erroneous recital in his impeachment testimony tothe House Judiciary Committee. “Based on our investigation,”he told the Committee, “we now know that some$50,000 of that [$300,000 fraudulent] loan went to benefitthe Whitewater corporation.”When the Office of the Independent Counsel was proddedby me and Iowa’s Senator Tom Harkin, at my request, toexplain the basis for Starr’s testimony, Deputy IndependentCounsel Edward J. Page replied to Senator Harkin on April13, 1999: “The testimony in the first McDougal trial servedas the basis for Judge Starr’s testimony,” Page wrote. Sent acopy of Patkus’s actual testimony and asked to square it withhis letter, Page was unable to offer a coherent explanation.The rationale for use of unnamed sources is that it servesthe public’s need for information it would not get otherwise.In this instance, the public was served up misinformation.Worse, the misinformation was given spin, by one party to adispute, and presented as fact. Worse still, the press continuouslyconcealed the existence of a confidential source, thuscompounding its flimflam of readers.If you are keeping score, score one for the Office of theIndependent Counsel, which succeeded in spreading itsslanted version of the facts widely; score one also for thepress, which had another juicy scandal story. The losers: adeceived and deluded public.Now, when the press is awash with concern about credibility,seems a good time for news organizations to levelwith the public about how they mishandled this story.However, such a confession would require members of thepress to disclose that Starr deputies were confidential sources.And breaching a promise of confidentiality, of course, isconsidered a journalistic no-no. But it isn’t always.The rock-bottom reason for source confidentiality is tobenefit the public. It would be perverse if the promise ofconfidentiality became, instead, a device to hoodwink thepublic. Implicit in the press-source bargain is that newsorganizations will protect identities in return for trustworthyinformation. When sources fail to live up to their end ofthe bargain, the press ought to blow the whistle. Besides,when the Independent Counsel’s office went public with thesame information it had earlier given reporters privately, itwaived confidentiality for all practical purposes.Anthony Lewis recently disclosed in his column the nameof a confidential source in Starr’s office who had misled himregarding an unrelated matter. Lewis did it both because ofthe deceit and because he learned that the source had toldthe same distorted story, on the record, to Bob Woodward.The Gannett Newspaper Division’s principles of ethicalconduct put it this way: “All sources should be informed thatthe newspaper will not honor confidentiality if the sourceshave lied or misled the newspaper.”Whether the expectation of honesty is implicit in thepress-source relationship or whether it is spelled out explicitlyto the source at the outset, it’s imperative that the pressexpose deception whenever possible. Otherwise, anonymoussources will enjoy a shield for duplicity. All the morereason, then, for journalists to come clean about theirshoddy reporting on Whitewater. ■Gilbert Cranberg, former Editor of The Des MoinesRegister’s editorial pages, teaches journalism at theUniversity of Iowa.Nieman Reports / Fall 1999 9