Big Delay

More interesting to me than Senator Craig's immediate credibility problem is the big delay in reporting his arrest. What was the cause of that?

The official story is:

The revelation late Monday that Sen. Larry Craig (R-Idaho) was arrested nearly three months ago for allegedly making sexual advances in a men's room raises the issue of how such an action could occur without the press reporting it.

...Even more surprising is that the unreported arrest occurred at a time when Craig was under scrutiny following previous allegations of gay relationships and sexual advances dating back to late 2006, when a blogger accused Craig of having relationships with men. The conservative senator has long denied the allegations.

McArdle said the latest incident, in which Craig was arrested June 11 for allegedly making advances to a police officer in a Minnesota airport bathroom, only came to his attention through a tip he received last week.

..."We have been working the story since we got the tip, getting the specific arrest report," he said. "We had to go through their different filing systems and we were able to expedite that process."

...Editors from The Idaho Statesman of Boise did not return calls seeking comment. But Editor Dean Miller of the Post Register in Idaho Falls defended the lack of reporting on the arrest by his paper and others, saying a misdemeanor arrest in another state does not always get easily discovered.

"It is not something we would ordinarily see," said Miller, who went on leave three weeks ago as a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University for a year. "It would not come to your attention if you are not in Minneapolis."

Some Washington, D.C.-based editors, such as Dean Baquet, who heads The New York Times' D.C. bureau, agreed.

"I am not so shocked that it would not get out," said Baquet, who is also a former editor at the Los Angeles Times. "The way things work, sometimes if you have a misdemeanor arrest, they don't make their way out here. It was not in his state. My guess is if it had happened at La Guardia Airport or at an airport in Washington it might be different."

Leonard Downie Jr., executive editor of The Washington Post, also found it unsurprising. "We don't have a Minneapolis correspondent," he said. "He is not a local congressman -- it happened in Minnesota and Idaho."

But in addition to the delayed reporting on the arrest is the way news outlets responded to last year's blogger allegations. The initial blog item was eventually reported by several news outlets nationally and locally, including four Idaho papers, according to the Idaho Statesman.

Miller said his paper reported the accusation and Craig's denial, but did not follow the story after that. "It was almost an anecdotal piece about Larry Craig being cool under fire," he said. "There was nothing documented, you were not going to substantiate anything."

Miller said he did not investigate the allegations further and did not have enough resources to pursue possible other accusations against Craig. "Outing a closeted U.S. senator was not our highest priority. But there were members of the staff who disagreed with that strenuously, that it was everyone's absolute right to know."

The Statesman, meanwhile, never reported on the blogger allegations last fall. But Editor Vicki Gowler assigned reporters to investigate Craig, with orders to find out if the gay relationship accusations were true and if other such proof existed.

In its story today about Craig's arrest, the Statesman revealed that it had uncovered evidence of other Craig liaisons or sexual advances, including allegations that he had sex with a man in a Union Station bathroom in Washington, D.C., but had not previously reported it. "Until Monday, the Statesman had declined to run a story about Craig's sex life, because the paper didn't have enough corroborating evidence and because of the senator's steadfast denial."

But the paper also revealed, "Over five months, the Statesman examined rumors about Craig dating to his college days and his 1982 pre-emptive denial that he had sex with underage congressional pages. The most serious finding by the Statesman was the report by a professional man with close ties to Republican officials. The 40-year-old man reported having oral sex with Craig at Washington's Union Station, probably in 2004. The Statesman also spoke with a man who said Craig made a sexual advance toward him at the University of Idaho in 1967 and a man who said Craig "cruised" him for sex in 1994 at the REI store in Boise. The Statesman also explored dozens of allegations that proved untrue, unclear, or unverifiable."

The Statesman's decision not to run its investigation until the arrest had been revealed raises the issue of when a news outlet should both investigate such allegations and report on its findings.

Poynter.org, the Web site of the Florida-based news institute, had its own struggles with reporting on the Craig allegations last Fall. Bill Mitchell, editor of Poynter online, wrote a piece last November describing how the site debated what to report following the blog posts, noting that the site at one point removed a report on the story.

"The 'It's out there dilemma' is something news organizations face," Mitchell said Tuesday about the issue of reporting what bloggers post. "When we lived in a world where journalism happened on printed paper or even one-shot broadcast outlets, the phenomenon of something like this being out there didn’t exist, there was no way for an activist to publish in a way that is possible in the Internet era."

Bob Steele, the Nelson Poynter Scholar for Journalism Values at Poynter, recalls Statesman Editor Gowler coming to him twice in the past year for guidance on the Craig story. He declined to reveal what they spoke about, but said it was obvious to him the paper was carefully reviewing its options. "I was impressed by the serious professional approach she took to decision-making," he recalled. "She was principled."

To me, it looks like the paper choked. The allegations were inflammatory, the target powerful, and, once again, the news media in Idaho decided to curry favor rather than do any real journalism. Someone from the outside had to pull the trigger for them.

Yeah, when I was young, New Mexico was like Idaho in this respect too. All kinds of interesting news never made the paper, because powerful interests saw that that the news was buried before it was ever revealed.