Oh, Everyone Knows That (Except You)

By ABBY GOODNOUGH

IN this era of blogosphere gossip, viral e-mail and infinite YouTube video archives, the open secret — unacknowledged by its keeper, theoretically hush-hush but widely suspected or known — arguably should be a thing of the past in public life.

But the case of Larry E. Craig, the Idaho senator arrested when an undercover police officer said he made overtures to him for sex, suggests otherwise. Though rumors had long swirled around the conservative Republican senator, the mainstream news media pointedly overlooked them until last week, when Roll Call broke the news of his arrest in June.

Most notably, The Idaho Statesman investigated reports about Mr. Craig for months after a gay blogger published a claim last fall that the senator had had sex with men, but decided against running uncorroborated accusations that Mr. Craig denied and continues to deny. As much traffic as the speculation generated on blogs before Mr. Craig’s arrest, it gained currency — that is, it became a “story” suitable for national publication and broadcast — only when it was backed by an arrest report.

The same went for former Representative Mark Foley of Florida, who was long rumored to be gay but whose open secret was widely exposed only after his sexually explicit electronic messages to former Congressional pages surfaced last fall and forced his resignation. And for Jim McGreevey, the married New Jersey governor whose homosexuality was suspected for years in local circles, but was left pretty much untouched by the news media. Only after disclosing an affair with a man he had once appointed to a six-figure state job did he resign.

Old-fashioned as it seems, there are still tacit rules about when an open secret can remain in its own netherworld, without consequence to the politician who keeps it. But now that any whisper can become a global shout in an instant, how much longer can those rules apply? And should they, anyway?

“What fascinates me is the question of, if it didn’t get out for all this time, what does it mean?” said Jeff Jarvis, a journalism professor who now blogs on media and politics on buzzmachine.com. “Does it mean journalists are doing a good job, or does it mean they are doing a bad job?”

Jack Bass, who is on the faculty at the College of Charleston and who co-wrote “Strom: The Complicated Personal and Political Life of Strom Thurmond,” said that at one time, politicians whose open secrets were exposed could use the fact to their advantage, on the theory that they were too outrageous to be believed and reflected badly only on the rumormonger. When a small South Carolina paper declared during Mr. Thurmond’s 1972 re-election campaign that he had fathered a child with a black woman — a fact not confirmed until after his death in 2003 — Mr. Thurmond distributed copies of the provocative headline to sympathetic voters. He won the race.

In the mainstream media, the recent standard for pursuing open secrets has been murky, but generally guided by the notion that private behavior matters when it is at odds with public declarations. Mr. Foley’s bawdy flirtation with pages was fair game not least because he had sponsored legislation seeking to protect children from online predators. Mr. Craig supported a 2006 amendment to the Idaho Constitution barring gay marriage and civil unions and has voted in Congress against gay rights.

Other secrets remain just that, usually because the politician in question has not been perceived as crossing an obvious line into hypocrisy, or he denies the rumors and no one can substantiate them. Perhaps no one wants to. They may not even be true.

“Most so-called open secrets are things we don’t really know the truth about,” said Alan Ehrenhalt, executive editor of Governing magazine. Regardless, he said: “It’s human nature not to pry into dark corners if you don’t have to. Most people would rather just let things be.”

And so it happens that a lot of states have lawmakers widely known for heavy drinking or sleeping with aides, whether or not the supposition is proved. One state official has long been rumored to be gay, and newspapers have investigated tips on his relationships. But only bloggers have published details, with little traction.

Rick Wilson, a Republican consultant based in Florida who has worked for Rudolph W. Giuliani, the former New York mayor, and Katherine Harris, the former Florida congresswoman, among others, said that most states have their own expressions for the circumstances under which open secrets stay secret. In Florida, he said, it’s the “Three County Rule” — no girlfriends within three counties of your home district. In New York, it’s the “Bear Mountain Compact” — nobody talks about what politicians do with their free time once they’ve crossed the Bear Mountain Bridge en route to Albany from points south.

“There’s a similar phrase in every state I’ve worked in,” Mr. Wilson said. “In a lot of cases it’s because the principals involved are powerful, and a lot of the people who know are aides or staff or lobbyists or even reporters who rely on these people for access. So you end up with this feeling of, ‘It’s just business, it’s not affecting their work.’ Once it starts affecting their work, then the rules change.”

Given the power of the Internet, though, the standards could now easily shift with each new salacious rumor reported online. One of the Internet’s main assets, its supporters say, is that it is unfiltered — but that allows sewage leaks of sorts, too.

Mr. Jarvis said bloggers constantly had to hone their judgment about when to ignore a rumor, write their own piece on it or — often the best choice, he said — link to another blog’s report on it.

“I believe we should do what we do best and link to the rest,” he said. “A link is not necessarily an endorsement, but a way to say ‘you go judge for yourself.’ ”

Let the blogger beware, though, of “link bait” — provocative or downright outrageous postings that some bloggers write merely to lure traffic.

As an antidote, a growing number of bloggers make it their chief goal to debunk scurrilous rumors circulating on the Web. Take Snopes.com, which calls itself “the definitive Internet reference source for urban legends, folklore, myths, rumors and misinformation.” Its section on politics has subcategories devoted to Bill and Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, Barack Obama and President Bush.

“It’s not strong enough yet,” Mr. Jarvis said of the online debunking trend, “but it’s part of a new architecture of the Web that is necessary.”

Michael Kinsley, founding editor of the online magazine Slate, said he used to believe that journalism should have an “intermediate standard” for publishing rumors — one that did not require firm corroboration. At one point, he said, he even defended Matt Drudge, the Internet gossip, for saying that 80 percent of what he published was accurate.

He regrets that stance. “I argued at the time that the Internet was the right place for that,” he said. “But at this point, the Internet is the mainstream media, so I think it should be as accurate as possible.”

Mr. Kinsley said attitudes toward open secrets have changed since the 1980’s, when he covered a well-known Democrat’s early presidential bid and quit The New Republic when it wouldn’t publish what he said was a solidly reported piece he wrote about the candidate’s philandering.

“My argument back then was it was elitist censorship for journalists not to publish what they knew about politicians because they were worried voters wouldn’t handle the information with as much sophistication as they thought appropriate,” he said. “Now, it turns out the prudes tend to be the Washington establishment journalists and the people who take a more sophisticated view are the voters.”

As proof, he offered the Monica Lewinsky scandal, which had little long-term effect on Mr. Clinton’s popularity.

Mr. Jarvis echoed that view, saying any expectation that politicians will be moral leaders is naïve. “There is always a taint of, if not corruption, then compromise about them,” he said. “This idea that they are moral leaders is moronic.”