At The Washington Post, talented Juan Williams wrote, an Oct. 10 column strenuously defending Clarence Thomas that became a virtual blueprint for Thomas’s strategy of indignation. But at the time he wrote it, “Don Juan” Williams, as he’s been called inside the Post, was himself the subject of an inquiry into charges of verbal sexual harassment brought by a Post employee; others had been informally complaining about Williams’s conduct for months. So why was his column published? The Post later acknowledged that top editors “mistakenly failed to inform “editorial-page editor Meg Greenfield (also a NEWSWEEK columnist) that an investigation of the charges was underway. Executive editor Leonard Downie, who is declining to discuss details of the case yet, understandably barred Williams discussing Thomas on TV. But when the paper’s media reporter, Howard Kurtz, tried to write about it on Oct. 11, he was at first rebuffed by Downie. To force their own paper to cover the issue, several angry women reporters known informally as the Fem Police leaked the names and home phone numbers of the alleged victims-not always with their permission-to the Baltimore Sun and Channel 9. After the Post editorialized in favor of Thomas, many women in the newsroom were outraged. One reporter recalls that “somebody was outraged at me simply for not being outraged enough.”
At The New York Times, Maureen Dowd, framing the story while the competition slept, scored a series of analytical scoops on the unfairness of the Senate to women and to Anita Hill. Betty Friedan called an editor to say that Dowd’s stories made up for the Times’s bungling of the Palm Beach rape story. But inside the Times and out, just-the-facts ma’am mossbacks grumbled that “editorials” were appearing on the front page. Their bumper sticker should be: KEEP THE TIMES BORING.
At The Wall Street Journal, the grumbling became a puckish editorial entitled “Politically Correct Newsrooms” that attacked Dowd and demanded that the Post “free Juan Williams.” The editorialists argued that the Journal’s news editors (normally their mortal enemies) were right to cover the Anita Hill story two days in a row as a news brief, a decision that angered many reporters. The editor responsible, Washington bureau chief Albert Hunt, tried to catch up by covering it big. Hunt, bashed by the Post for his slowness on the same day the Post favorably profiled National Public Radio’s Nina Totenberg, shook off any embarrassment and took off after Totenberg. Last week he detailed in a convincing way how she had been fired from the now defunct National Observer for plagiarizing a 1972 story on Tip O’Neill. Totenberg hadn’t been first on the Anita Hill story (that scoop belonged to Newsday’s Timothy Phelps, who beat her by a few hours). But she’s a big player in this drama, and her claim in the Post that sex harassment was a factor in her leaving the Observer did open her up to scrutiny on that old episode. Still, even some of Hunt’s friends saw his tone as gratuitous. And Totenberg has a point in describing herself as “hamburger meat in a food fight between two giant newspapers.”
On TV, you could see the beef grinding. Bryant Gumbel, who apparently applies different standards to race and sex bias, sparred all week on “Today” with Katie Couric, at one point suggesting that the real problem in the workplace was men being “threatened physically” by women, not the other way around. On “The McLaughlin Group,” the host and his sidekicks had plenty to say critical of Anita Hill, but they weren’t big on context. No one mentioned that in 1989 McLaughlin, while denying impropriety, settled a sexual-harassment suit brought by a former employee who charged that he repeatedly attempted to touch her.
Beyond all the media eye gouging lies a bigger question: why did the press miss the story for so long? It now turns out that scores of people on Capitol Hill and elsewhere knew about Anita Hill’s concern. To this day, few of Thomas’s ex-employees have been interviewed. Why leave it to the highly politicized Senate to find the truth? That’s the media’s job. Even with Clarence Thomas on the Supreme Court, it still is.
