INQUIRING MINDS WANT TO KNOW: IS THIS STORY TRUE?

By Richard Zoglin

The supermarket tabloids don't usually pay much attention to politics--they have their hands full chronicling Sharon Stone's love life and following Madonna around with a camera--but when they do, they make it count. In 1987 the National Enquirer printed a photo of Donna Rice sitting on Gary Hart's lap, creating the most infamous visual epitaph for his crashed political career. Four years ago, the Star ran a story on Gennifer Flowers' alleged affair with Bill Clinton, throwing a major scare into his campaign just before the New Hampshire primary. And last week it was the Star's sensational account of Dick Morris' alleged trysts with a call girl that prompted the President's top political strategist to resign.

It also prompted another round of soul searching by the mainstream media. Once again the nation's major networks and newspapers were forced to follow the tabloids' lead, pursuing a story they felt uneasy with, unearthed by a publication many regard with disdain. They were wary, not just of the story's source and tawdry sexual details but of its timing. The Star's scoop was first made public on the very day of President Clinton's acceptance speech, in a front-page story in the New York Post, a newspaper owned by conservative media mogul Rupert Murdoch. (Murdoch once owned the Star too, but he sold it in 1990 to the company that also owns the National Enquirer, its chief competitor.)

The story highlighted an ongoing journalistic culture clash. Supermarket tabloids operate by different rules from most of the mainstream media. For one thing, they relish the sort of steamy subject matter (especially sex) that other publications shy away from; for another, they frequently pay money for stories. Star editors admit they paid 37-year-old prostitute Sherry Rowlands for her details of the alleged trysts with Morris (the amount was "under $50,000," they say). Yet they insist that the transaction did not make them any less confident of the truth of her allegations. In this instance the Star gathered enough supporting evidence to satisfy most editors--though the way they got it would probably make many blanch.

According to Star reporter Richard Gooding (a former metro editor for the New York Daily News and the New York Post), Rowlands first contacted the tabloid "out of the blue" in mid-July and told them she was a call girl who had been seeing Morris. Gooding was initially unimpressed, he recalls, telling her, "If it's simply a story of a presidential adviser hiring a call girl, it's probably not a story." After several more conversations in which she divulged more details and showed him her diaries, Gooding and his editors grew considerably more interested.

Was Rowlands steered to the Star by Republicans out to embarrass Clinton? "Obviously it's not impossible," says editor in chief Phil Bunton. "But we saw nobody else's fingerprints on this story but hers." One thing that made him doubt any political motives was her naivete. Rowlands didn't know what jobs Clinton aides like Leon Panetta and George Stephanopoulos held, and had misspelled their names in her diaries.

Along with those diaries (which could, of course, have been fabricated), Rowlands provided other corroborating evidence, including tapes of Morris' voice on her answering machine and a canceled check for a college speaking engagement that he had signed over to her. Star editors were also impressed when Rowlands said Morris had confided in her a "military secret"--that signs of life on Mars had been discovered. It wasn't until a week later, the Star reported, that the news was announced.

Still, says Gooding, "there was a good circumstantial case, but nothing that absolutely nailed it." Starting on Aug. 14, Gooding says, he spent "virtually every waking hour" with Rowlands in an effort to come up with visual confirmation. Four days later, the Star reserved a room overlooking the balcony of the suite (No. 205) at Washington's Jefferson Hotel where she and Morris supposedly met, and Gooding plotted to take pictures. (A photographer would shoot stills while Gooding operated a video camera). Rowlands came up with the idea of bringing along her Yorkshire terrier, Bijou, to make sure she could lure Morris onto the balcony.

The Star sleuths spent five more days waiting, as Morris' work delayed a planned assignation with Rowlands; finally they met on the night of Aug. 22. While Morris was on the phone, Rowlands went onto the balcony. Morris soon followed, and the rest is tabloid history. "I didn't want her to do anything out of the ordinary," says Gooding, in response to charges of entrapment. "I didn't ask her to ask him any questions, to pump him or anything. But the only way that people would believe this story was to have pictures."

Once he had them, Gooding called Morris last Tuesday for comment (Morris hung up on him once and did not respond to several messages) and prepared to run the story. But five days before the issue was scheduled to hit the newsstands, the Star offered its scoop to several newspapers, including the Chicago Tribune and the Wall Street Journal. Only the New York Post went for it. Releasing it to other papers before its actual publication, Bunton insists, was simply an effort to protect the Star's scoop after Morris had been alerted to the story. Said Bunton: "The White House spin doctors might well try and do some damage control, and Dick Morris might resign quietly for personal reasons before we came out. We had five days before we were going on sale. So we got a bit nervous."

Other editors were nervous too--about having to pursue the tawdry story in the midst of reporting on loftier matters like Clinton's acceptance speech. Still, it was a story no news outlet could ignore, one serious enough to bring down the President's chief strategist. As happened so often during the O.J. Simpson trial, the mainstream press had to acknowledge that the tabloids, and tabloid tactics, can sometimes unearth legitimate news. And the Star got another notch in its gun belt.

--By Richard Zoglin. Reported by Andrea Sachs/New York

With reporting by Andrea Sachs/New York