MediaWatch: June 1994

Janet Cooke Award: Newsweek Hailed Hill, But Questions Jones' Credibility and Sexual Behavior

St. Anita vs. The "Dogpatch Madonna"

Anita Hill and Paula Jones both charged major political figures with sexual harassment. To many reporters, Hill represented women who faced harassment at the hands of men who just didn't "get it." Reporters did not question her personal or financial motives. (Since then, she's earned more than $500,000 in speaking fees, and signed a book contract worth a reported $1 million.) But when Jones filed suit, some reporters told "tangy tales" about her past. For presenting the most obvious and graceless double standard, Newsweek earned the June Janet Cooke Award.

Two days after Prof. Hill testified against Clarence Thomas, Sen. Alan Simpson announced that critical stories about Hill were arriving. In the October 28, 1991 Newsweek, reporter Eleanor Clift protested: "The days of Simpson Chic are over. Now he is more often compared to Red-baiter Joseph McCarthy. The image of Simpson flinging open his jacket and declaring he had lots of `stuff' against Anita Hill -- while revealing nothing -- was the lowest of many low points in the Clarence Thomas hearings. Any senator with a sense of history should have said, as attorney Joseph Welch eventually did to McCarthy, `Senator, have you no shame?'"

As for Hill's past, Newsweek's Eloise Salholz wrote in the October 21, 1991 issue: "Little in Hill's life suggested she would one day discuss sexual matters before an audience of millions. Quiet and intensely private, Hill apparently has always been a straight arrow. Neighbors say the law professor -- still known back home by her middle name, Faye, was an unusually bright and determined child...[Law school colleagues] say it is inconceivable that the never-married professor would fabricate the allegations against Thomas."

That same issue of Newsweek devoted much of its attention to how women needed to be believed. "There was no way that roughly 4 million years of male supremacy was going to yield to Robert's Rules of Order," said the introduction. The issue included a six-page article on sexual harassment, headlined "When Anita Hill talked last week, [women] heard themselves -- and they're fed up with the fact that men don't get it." General Editor Laura Shapiro wrote a three-page article on "Why Women Are Angry," and Eleanor Clift penned a sidebar headlined "Congress: The Ultimate Men's Club." Senior Writer Jonathan Alter wrote that Republicans suggested that Hill was "a peddler of innuendo and anonymously sourced slander. Anita Hill was hardly that."

Months later, Newsweek reporter Bob Cohn found a different story. Recounting tales told against both Thomas and Hill, Cohn wrote one source saw Hill "aggressively jockeying for position among other staffers waiting outside Thomas's EEOC office so she could get a seat near the boss." He reported Lawrence Shiles' affidavit that the professor put pubic hairs in test papers, and another student who claimed Hill made sexual comments to him, and called her "the world's kinkiest law professor."

But Cohn's story appeared in the January 6 & 13, 1992 New Republic. Newsweek did not print it, running only a December 2 "Periscope" item focusing on how "Republican leaders tried to dig up information that would discredit Anita Hill." Speaking mostly off the record, Cohn told MediaWatch that the magazine did not "cover up" the story in 1992, as a MediaWatch headline then suggested, but decided not to run a story since they could not establish who was lying.

But Newsweek's May 15, 1994 story on Paula Jones, authored by reporter Mark Hosenball, with help from Ginny Carroll and Cohn, quickly made news by uncritically citing Clinton attorney Bob Bennett (sounding a lot like Alan Simpson), who "says he has `people coming out of the woodwork' to discredit her story."

Newsweek then quoted brother-in-law Mark Brown describing a duck hunt: "She went with one man and when she got there, she spotted another one. She goes right up to him, puts her leg between the legs of the other man and rubs herself up and down on him...Promiscuity? Good gosh. Her mother is fixing to get the shock of her life when Paula's life comes out...She went out and had herself a good time. I've seen her at the Red Lobster pinch men on the ass."

Hosenball refused to speak on the record to MediaWatch except to say "the story speaks for itself." Newsweek may have been trying to balance Hosenball's revelation that Douglas Harp, a former state police official, said Bill Clinton "actively sought out rumors and damaging information that could be used against his opponents," including "tapes of a conversation with a woman purporting to describe sex-and-drug parties attended by a pair of Republicans competing for the gubernatorial nomination."

Cohn, the only one to work on both stories, told MediaWatch: "We've certainly plumbed Bill Clinton's character in our magazine, and so we plumbed Paula Jones's character as well. In my New Republic piece, I had anonymous people who had axes to grind against Anita Hill. It was not for attribution, and I knew from my reporting that they had ideological or personal reasons to dislike Anita Hill. In our Paula Jones coverage, whether it was Mark Brown or other names, these sources were on the record, and seemed to have less of an ideological interest in the issue." But wasn't Brown embittered? Cohn replied: "I don't know."

The next week, Newsweek followed with "Paula Jones's Credibility Gap."No story detailed "Anita Hill's Credibility Gap." Reporter Melinda Beck wrote that not only did Mrs. Jones gain merit raises after the alleged incident of sexual harassment by Bill Clinton, she was a Clinton "groupie" who "liked to mill around the reception desk in the Governor's office" and who "stayed almost two years after the alleged encounter with Clinton -- twice as long as she'd remained at any other job." She was a "Dogpatch Madonna" noted for "drinking beer, dancing, and other things that were forbidden at home," as well as her "flirtatious behavior."

Beck added: "In theory, the tangy tales floated by relatives and old boyfriends about Paula's past should have little bearing on her charges against Clinton -- any more than a rape victim's sexual history should be used against her in court. But defense attorneys do that all the time."

But is it the media's job to act as defense attorney? Beck also refused to go on the record except to respond to charges of a double standard: "To journalists, we go out looking for facts, and in this case, our story was driven by the fact that there was factual evidence contradicting charges in the lawsuit she brought...the circumstances here are quite different [than the Hill case], and that Paula Jones's life is going to face, could well face this kind of scrutiny in the courtroom." It's certainly not scrutiny Anita Hill ever faced in the pages of Newsweek.

Featured Posts

Bozell Slams Hillary’s Shills in Media: ‘They Are Covering for’ Her

Get the Latest News From CNSNews

Get the Latest Media Analysis on NewsBusters