“Bad Girl,” screamed The New York Post a week ago Friday, sporting a front-page photo of the prostitute who was the instrument of Gov. Eliot Spitzer’s self-destruction. She wore nothing on top but her hands.
“Bed Fellow, Love Gov’s boy toy bares 3-ways with wife,” said The Post on Monday, airing steamy charges by a former driver for James McGreevey, who resigned as governor of New Jersey in 2004 after saying he was gay and had had an affair with a male state official.
“Exclusive: Albany Bombshell, New Gov: I Had Affair,” shouted The Daily News the next day, after David A. Paterson, within hours of replacing the disgraced Spitzer, sat down with one of the newspaper’s columnists and acknowledged his own past infidelity.
“Girls! Girls! Girls!,” screamed The Post on Wednesday, after Paterson said at a press conference that it was several affairs, not one, and that his former lovers included a woman on the state payroll.
Through this fetid swamp of sexual misdeeds — real and alleged, involving three governors in two states — The Times has threaded its way with both careful reporting and good judgment over the past two weeks. It broke and stayed ahead on the most consequential of the stories, the stunning news that Spitzer, who brought a moralistic approach to government, was “Client 9” of an international prostitution ring. It handled the Paterson story with appropriate restraint. And it tried hard to ignore the seamy McGreevey story because he is no longer in office and the charges came in the midst of an ugly divorce, hardly Times fare.
The episodes have presented interesting challenges for a newspaper that normally steers well clear of the salacious and only a month earlier had made what many regarded as an embarrassing misstep by reporting allegations it could not prove of an extramarital affair involving a lobbyist and John McCain.
With the Spitzer story, The Times had the goods, and the issue was of undeniable public interest. When the newspaper asked the governor’s staff two weeks ago, on a Sunday, for records of his travel between Feb. 11 and Feb. 15, he knew the game was up. In that period, he had had a tryst with a call girl, “Kristen,” later identified by The Times as Ashley Alexandra Dupré, at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, the night before he testified at a Congressional hearing.
At 1:55 p.m. on Monday, March 10, the day after The Times requested the records, it posted on its Web site a headline that took away New York’s collective breath: “Spitzer Is Linked to Prostitution Ring.” The newspaper said he was expected to make a statement shortly. Within two hours, a grim Spitzer stepped to a lectern in his Manhattan office and said: “I have acted in a way that violates my obligations to my family and that violates my, or any, sense of right and wrong.” He gave no details. Two days later, he resigned.
Readers were transfixed. “You could not make this stuff up,” said George Goodburn in a comment on the newspaper’s Web site. Nic Leobold said: “This is probably the greatest article you’ve ever published,” though he could not resist adding, “(considering you’re a leftist publication).”
A few readers complained that the story was diverting attention from more important news like the war in Iraq or the swooning economy. But that’s like saying a newspaper cannot walk and chew gum at the same time. On the same front page with the first Spitzer article were stories about a bombing that killed five American soldiers in Baghdad and the problems of private equity firms.
Some readers were distressed at the initial Spitzer headline on the Web site because it did not make clear that his “link” to the prostitution ring was as a customer. Steven Brant of Flushing, Queens, said that when the headline was shown on cable television news, he thought Spitzer “was involved with running a prostitution business on the side.”
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