A Smear's Journey to Page One

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NEW YORK, February 18, 2004 - She smiles back from page one of Tuesday's New York Daily News. Her face is closely cropped, wrapped in 240-point Arial; 'I'M NO MONICA' the headline declares.

The lead spills to page three, where the 27-year-old Columbia grad Alexandra Polier denies rumors linking her romantically to Senator John Kerry. The allegations of an affair, made public last Thursday by conservative rumormonger Matt Drudge, had ignited an online firestorm that, over time, spread from right-wing websites to foreign tabloids, and ultimately into U.S. mainstream press.

In the front-page Daily News story, Polier calls reports of an affair between her and the democratic frontrunner 'completely false.' Other leading American newspapers, including The New York Times, Washington Post and USA Today, trumpeted her denial, marking an unusual passage in journalism where mainstream news outlets report the negation of a story that they initially did not cover.

The Daily News's front-page billing of the denial would indicate that readers had gone elsewhere to read the rumor that sparked the scandal. This is likely given Drudge's claim that more than 15 million people visited his site after he released the report on Thursday. The fervid attention subsequently heaped upon the story by partisan media groups and British and Australian tabloids also filtered onto the screens and into the minds of many Americans.

Cutting Corners To Stand above the News Clutter

These news sources, once inaccessible to average Americans, now appear alongside mainstream news stories in the results of a simple Google News search.

According to a recent report from the Pew Research Center for People and the Press, more than 40 millions Americans go online for election news. Much of this comes via Google News and other news search engines that return news links based upon a quantitative -- not qualitative -- search process. As a result, major news organizations find their headlines intermingled with those of publications they might consider less scrupulous than their own.

How do mainstream American media outlets lift themselves above the fray? For the most part they don't, said Ken Auletta, media critic for The New Yorker and author of 'Backstory: Inside the Business of News'.

'In a cluttered information world, where you no longer are as dominant as you might have been, where people can chose from several sources, there's a tendency to excuse yourself from doing your own reporting when someone else breaks the story first,' Auletta said. 'It doesn't matter if that source is a Drudge or an Imus, there's a tendency to look for an excuse to print rumors without having to go it alone.'

Auletta sees this as a dangerous byproduct of the accelerated news cycle. The machinations that transform un-sourced reports into legitimate subject matter for mainstream consumption exist within every news organization; a prominent smear that emerges from the fringes of the Internet will eventually make its way up the media food chain onto their front pages.

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