Now that Thomas has been confirmed to the Supreme Court, it is time to take stock of the various objections to news coverage that this controversy provoked. First, an assessment of complaints from the right. Many conservatives were convinced that reporters were out to block Thomas by exploiting a news leak. Closely held Senate Judiciary committee information had been disclosed to Newsday's Timothy Phelps and NPR's Nina Totenberg. Their stories about Hill's allegations jolted the country on Sunday, October 6. Coming just two days before the Senate was scheduled to vote on Thomas, the leaks seemed to many to be politically motivated, timed to derail his nomination. The leaks prompted the Senate to delay Thomas's confirmation vote for one week, so the committee-- under attack for not having taken Hill's allegation seriously-- could probe the charges. For the first time Thomas's nomination seemed to be in real jeopardy.

Conservatives began denouncing the leaks with fierce indignation, demanding a formal investigation (now in progress) and offering to pay a bounty of more than $30,000 to anyone who could identify the leaker. This reaction was, of course, part of a long tradition of selective outrage over leaks (a leak is monstrous if it hurts politically but not nearly so heinous if it helps, and Republicans themselves leak like crazy when it suits them). But what was the substance of their case against this particular leak? For one thing, they argued that reporting it was unethical, because it would damage Hill, who wanted to keep her allegations confidential. "This is going to be one of the saddest chapters in American journalism." Senator Alan Simpson predicted during an October 7 ABC Nightline confrontation with Totenberg. Casting himself as a protector of women, he said that disclosing Hill's name was like disclosing the name of a rape victim: "You've blown the cover of a person on a sexual harassment charge ... you will have destroyed this woman." Of course, it was Simpson and his allies who immediately set about trying to destroy her. Judiciary Committee Republicans accused her ot concocting her story and a committing perjury and eventually branded her mentally unstable.

There is no question that journalists trespassed on Hill's privacy in exploiting the leak. Senate staffers had approached her, having heard that she had been harassed, and Hill had provided details on condition tha they not be made public. But then someone leaked her affidavit to reporters, who leaped on the story. Thus, against her will, Hill was placed in the spotlight. On balance, this intrusion seems justified, considering that most of the senators preparing to vote on Thomas were not even aware of the allegations against him, and should have been. (Judiciary Committee members say they kept their knowledge of Hill's allegations under wraps to protect the privacy of the nominee and his accuser.)

Thomas's defenders also suggested that reporters who exploited the leak were, in effect, assassinating the federal judge's character on behalf of the Democrats. This argument confuses two issues-- the motivation for the leak and the question of wheter the allegations were true. The leakers may well have been Demoracts out to get Thomas because he i a conservative (I'd be surprised to learn they were anything else). Even so, it is still possible that Thomas was guilty of sexual harassment. This surely was a serious matter that had to be explored by the media. Since the Judiciary Committee had opted not to explore it, reporting the leak was necessary to force the Senate into action. Reporters' responsibility is to try to get to the bottom of things, not cover them up, even if some news subjects suffer as a result. (It does seem that the possible motivations of leakers should be addressed in a story like this. What both the Phelps and Totenberg pieces lacked was a section that, without giving away the leakers' identities, could have suggested what might have prompted this disclosure at the time it occurred-- i.e., only after Thomas's foes had exhausted their other anti-Thomas ammunition.)

Another, more considered, objection to the leak reporting comes from Brent Baker of the conservative Media Research Center. Baker argues that Phelps and Totenberg reported their leaks too hastily, recklessly jeopardizing Thomas's reputation before they had done enough reporting to justify their stories. He noted in an interview that Hill's allegation was far different from a claim that nominee X was guilty of something that definitely could be proven, such as stock fraud. Hill's allegation was an instance of her-word-against-his (as is generally the case in sexually harassment cases); there were no witnesses and real corroboration was impossible. Baker contends that, given those limitations and the inevitable damage to Thomas's reputation that disclosure would cause, Phelps and Totenberg should have held their stories until they had established, among other things, that there had been some pattern of misbehavior, with other women claiming he had been guilty of sexual misconduct with them. (Charlotte Observer editor Angela Wright eventually contacted the Judiciary Committee to allege that Thomas had put sexual pressure on her when whe worked for him at the EEOC.)

Baker makes a strong case, but he does not give sufficient weight to the high-pressure situation in which Phelps and Totenberg found themselves. The Senate vote was just a couple of days away that Sunday, and if the story had not gotten out immediately there might never have been a Senate investigation. Given the time constraints, the two reports were not irresponsible. They cited "corrobation" from a friend of Hill's, who said Hill had complained of being sexually harassed at the time of the alleged conduct in the early '80s. The Totenberg piece carried Thomas's denial of the allegations. Phelps, unfortunately, could not reach hime for comment, but he did include quotes from employee Phyllis Berry-Myers, who had worked for Thomas and who said it was inconceivable that he could be guilty of harassment.

Leaks aside, conservative groups like Baker's complain of a pervasive liberal bias in coverage. Even the Wall Street Journal editorial board got into the act, accusing The Washington Post and The New York Times of taking a "politically correct" pro-Hill approach to the issue (October 17 lead editorial). Conservative critics are able to cite some specific instances of slanted reporting (see below), but overall it does not appear that liberal bias was much of a factor during the Hill-Thomas hearings. On the contrary: a report by the Center for Media and Public Affairs in Washington concluded that Thomas got much better press than Hill during the hearings. This study of some 220 network news broadcasts and newspaper articles found that, after the hearings began, nearly four out of five individuals quoted in news accounts backed Thomas. (Just prior to the hearings, a majority had been critical of him.) As to Hill, "more than three out of four [sources] expressed doubt or outright hostility towards her allegations." These data hardly suggest pervasive liberal bias. Instead, they suggest that pro-Thomas forces dominated the debate during the hearings on Hill's allegations of sexual harrassment and that the media rather passively reflected this, just as they reflected the domination of pro-Hill advocates in the days prior to those hearings.

As to specific of bias, consider these excerpts from the October 21 edition of Time, cited in the conservative newsletter Media Watch. Time associated editor Jill Smolowe wrote: "Given the detail and consistency of her testimony, it was almost inconceivable that Hill, rather than describing her own experiences, was fabricating the portrait of a sexual-harassment victim...." In fact, it is not "almost inconceivable" that she was fabricating-- the polls indicated that millions of Americans found the idea quite conceivable. In the same edition, senior editor Nancy Gibbs declared:

Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth were slaves by birth, freedom fighters by temperament. Rosa Parks was a tired seamstress who shoved history forward by refusing to give up her seat on the bus.... The latest to claim her place in line is Anita Hall, a private, professional woman unwilling to relinquish her dignity without a fight.

In fact, Hill is another Rosa Parks only if one assumes she is telling the truth.

Elsewhere, of course, one could find pro-Thomas biases. The New Republic's Fred Barnes asserted without evidence on the October 12 McLaughlin Group broadcast that Hill was spinning "a monstrous lie," and Morton Kondracke, also of TNR, bolstered the theory, saying Hill might be compared to Tawana Brawly, John McLaughlin (himself no stranger to sex harrassment allegations) compared Hill to Janet Cooke.

For some less ideologically driven critics, a major complaint centered on sensationalism of this story. Political scientist Normal Ornstein, a barometer of centrist conventional wisdom, said in an interview that television coverage revealed warped news priorities at NBC, CBS, and ABC. They ran hours of Hill-Thomas testimony, whereas as they had not provided live coverage of his pre-Hill confirmation hearings, at which big issues like abortion were on the table. This showed that ratings drove their news decisions and that personal scandal wins out every time over drier but equally important issues.

This is true, up to a point. Commercial networks do pander shamelessly. But as Ornstein acknowledged in a second interview, Hill-Thomas was, by almost any measure, a bigger story and deserved more coverage than the first round of Thomas hearings (where the nominee spent hours ducking the abortion issue and revealing as little about himself as possible). Once Hill's allegations became public, much more drama was to be had: there was a substantive issue (sexual harrassment), and there were multiple conflicts (one man vs. one woman, men vs. women, black men vs. black women, women vs. Congress, Congress vs. the White House). And, of course, there was sex. Judiciary Committee chairman Joseph Biden described the high megatonnage of the story: "I know of no system of government where, when you add the kerosene of sex, the heated flame of race, and the incendiary nature of television lights, you are not going to have an explosion" (quoted on an ABC Town Meeting, October 16).

Other objectors offered a kind of prude's critique, complaining that it was a travesty to bring all that graphic talk about Thomas's alleged references to sex with animals, and porn star Long Dong Silver, and public hairs on Coke cans into our living rooms, where children and old ladies could be watching. According to an ABC News poll released after the hearings, news media were rated lower for their Hill-Thomas performance than were the Democrats, the Republicans, Congress, or George Bush. One has to assume that the low rating was due in part to the graphic subject matter.

Of course, even those who voiced disgust kept watching. They could not do without the details. The story could not be told adequately without them. In fact, some TV journalists issued warnings to parents that simultaneously served as advertisements for the juicy material to come. Dan Rather, at the start of the Saturday October 12 hearings, said earnestly: "Now we want to strongly caution parents ... there may once again be extremely graphic testimony that you may not want your children to watch. You may want to think about that." A few moments later, correspondent Bob Schieffer voiced awe at a case so unprecedented that it had forced the anchor of CBS News to say such a thing:

SCHIEFFER (intense, portentou delivery): Let me just go back to the words you used at the start of this broadcast. We want to warn parents that what they may hear might be offensive to their children. Have you ever begun a broadcast of a Senate hearing with those kind of words?

RATHER: Never

SCHIEFFER: It seems to me that illustrates and underlines just how very different this is....

Come now, wasn't this laying it on a bit thick?

Enough of the prudes-- on to the feminists, who had quite different objections. One was that the news media, especially TV, were manipulated by the Republicans and used as tools to demolish Hill. Judith Lichtman of the Women's Legal Defense Fund argues, for example, that, during the hearings, journalists failed to draw the attention of viewers to Republican strategies and to the fumbling of committee Democrats. She contends that the networks and newspapers should have brought in experts to challenge questionable claims like the allegation that Hill had committed perjury, the insinuation that Hill might be "delusional," and Thomas's striking claim that he was the victim of "a high-tech lynching for uppity blacks." Instead, Lichtman says, most reporters were more conduits: "The media portrayed what was presented to them-- they therefore were manipulated.... We were let down by the media."

Lichtman is correct that reporters had seemingly little impact on public perceptions during the hearings. She is a bit off the mark as to why. Networks and newspapers actually did make some effort to provide the sort of commentary she says was lacking (as well as counter-opinion from conservatives). But, for reasons we'll get to shortly, this news analysis does not apepar to have mattered much.

Here are some examples of the critical commentary. NBC's Robert Bazell, on the October 13 Nightly News, interviewed New York psychiatrist Robert Spitzer, who voiced extreme skepticism about the assertion that Hill was living in a fantasy world. Black commentator Bob Herbert on NBC's Sunday Today (October 13) sharply questioned Thoma's claim to be a victim of racism. In a series of live network interviews, sexual harassment experts like University of Michigan law professor Catharine MacKinnon disputed a Republican claim that no genuine harassment victim would have followed Thomas to a new job, as Hill did in 1983. (Hill went with Thomas from the Department of Education to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.) Reporters also tried to give audiences an idea of Republican strategy and Democratic timidity. "One had the impression that ... Orrin Hatch sort of played the part of Mike Tyson," Dan Rather told CBS viewers October 11. "Before Senator Biden could sort of get off his stool, Hatch was at him, all over him, and decked him." ABC's Tim O'Brien (World News Sunday, October 13) reported that Biden had acquiesced to Republicans, givint Thomas the big p.r. boost of live prime-time exposure.

As the opinion polls suggest, however, the impact of all this critical reporting was marginal. Why? The main reason, I suspect, is that this was a riveting live television event. Millions were watching and drawing their own conclusions. They did not need reporters to provide a news filter, so viewers may have listened even less closely than usual to commentary and analysis.

Live TV was only part of the press's "control" problem. In some cases, we lost control over some of our own debilitating impulses, which helped to undermine whatever small influence critical commentary might otherwise have had. For instance, there was the "Babble Factor": much of the intelligent news analysis (liberal, moderate, and conservative) was simply drowned out by the compulsive babbling and hyperbole that this event seemed to arouse in journalists. On October 11, Peter Jennings said of the Judiciary Committee, which has its share of dim bulbd: "One of the things we of course might remind people as they watch these proceedings ... is that these senators are all profoundly intelligent men on this committee. In many cases they're all lawyers." Over on CBS, Dan Rather was groping for simple solutions. "If the FBI can't determine who's lying between the two, let's have some homicide detective out from Phoenix or New York City to spend a few days on this," he blurted on October 12. NBC's Brokaw said on October 11 that it would be bad if the hearings were to last several days because "it's in the national interest to have this all done as quickly and efficiently and completely as possible." As if doing it quickly were compatible with doing it efficiently and completely! (In order to meet the tight Senate-imposed timetable, the committee decided not to all any expert witnesses at all-- making a thorough investigation virtually impossible.)

Then, for a few minutes on October 15, just before the Senate vote on Thomas. NBC seemed to lose complete control of its critical faculties. The network jumped from Capitol Hill coverage to Pinpoint, Georgia, where Thoma's mother could be seen live, rocking back and forth and praying in a neighbor's kitchen ("They're trying to keep him from helping us, Lord, but I ask you, Jesus, to please give it to him!" etc.) The sequence was captioned "NBC News Exclusive." The network seemed to be boasting, but why was difficult to fathom.

Another way in which journalists got side-tracked might be called the "Perry Masson Factor." Refusing to heed warnings from calmer heads, like ABC correspondent Hal Bruno, an astonishing number of journalists accepted a Republican comparison between the hearings and a trial. Republicans (and some Democrats, including the feckless Biden, at times) advanced the trial metaphor, emphasizing that Thomas must be judged by the standard of innocent until proven guilty, even though other nominees have been rejected on grounds of reasonable doubt and no candidate has a right to a seat on the Supreme Court. Reporters took the bait and reinforced a presumption-of-innocence message. "A political trial [is] effectively what we have going on here today. ... There is a kind of trial aspect to all of this after all," said Brokaw during coverage of the October 11 hearings. "We have four institutions and people on trial ... in a nonlegal proceeding," said Bryant Gumbel on the same broadcast. "I guess in a sense it is a trial in a way [and] we're seeing the defense lay out its strategy here," said Bob Schieffer over on CBS on October 12, "It is a trial in a way," agreed his boss, Dan Rather. And so on. By the eve of the confirmation vote, over half the public agreed that Thomas should get the benefit of the doubt, according to a CBS-New York Times poll. Senaate Republican leader Bob Dole said polls like that were what assured Thomas's confirmation.

Finally, there was the "Shovel Factor." Reporters (including me) failed to dig hard enough on their own during the Senate's consideration of Thomas. Why weren't the sexual harassment allegations against Thomas disclosed earlier? After all, Phelps of Newsday says reporters were hearing about the allegations as long ago as last July. Why wasn't more done to investigate Thomas's alleged taste for pornography, an allegation that became very pertinent in sizing up Hill's veracity? Why didn't reporters explain why Angela Wright, who complained that Thomas had sexually pressured her, was never called a witness?

Before Hill's accusations became public, why wasn't more done to explore allegations that Thomas had breached conflict of interest standards? In one case, he ruled in favor of Ralston Purina, rather than recusing himself, even though his mentor and patron, Senator John Danforth, had a big interest in the company. In another case, Thomas was accused of delaying releaes of one of his controversial appeals court decisions, possibly to bolster his confirmation prospects. (Thomas denies any delay.) I was able to find fewer than ten stories devoted to the Ralston Purina issue and only a few focusing on the delayed ruling controvery. Meanwhile, as the left-leaning Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting group points out, news organizations ran dozes of articles about Thomas's climb from rags to riches-- the Horatio Alger theme that the administration played up to divert attention from the nominee's meager judicial experience. Reporters had, once again, bought the Republican sales pitch.

Pro-Thomas salesmen continued to pitch successfully even after the nominee was confirmed, with Justice Thomas actively participating (which is highly unusual conduct in that Supreme Court members have traditionally been media-shy). Thomas cooperated in the ultimate stuff piece, a seven-page, November 11 People magazine cover article, "How We Survived," told in the first person by his wife, Virginia. In it, she asserts that Hill "was probably in love with my husband," and that her changes "were politically motivated." She makes a point of describing the importance of home prayer sessions to the family. In a photograph illustrating the article, the two pose on a sofa, reading a Bible together.

Why are the Thomas continuing a p.r. offensive? Perhaps as a kind of preemptive strike. As Phelps pointed out in a recent panel discussion, reporters are still on the case, investigating whether there is solid evidence to back up allegations that Thomas committed perjury during the hearings. "We hear that people are still digging, trying to impugn his integrity," Virginia Thomas said in People. "But it's over." That may be so. But if new derogatory stories about the judge are broken in the months ahead, I would not be too surprised if we hear even more about the Thomas family's devotional habits-- stopping short, one can only hope, of another urgent TV prayer bulletin from Pinpoint, Georgia.

William Boot is the pen name of Christopher Hanson, Washington correspondent for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Research assistance was provided by David Rynecki, a CJR intern, and The Media Research Center lent videotapes of television coverage.