Wednesday, January 28, 1998

First impressions' force

The instantaneous communication afforded by television and the Internet today are great for those who want to keep up with the latest details of a big, breaking story.

We might sometimes, though, be sacrificing accuracy for speed and doing permanent damage with mistaken reports that remain fixed in people's minds despite all later efforts to set the record straight.

Take Monday night's incident with the Dallas Morning News, which published in its early edition for Tuesday -- and put on its Internet site Monday evening -- that a Secret Service agent said he saw President Clinton and former intern Monica Lewinsky in a compromising situation in the White House.

The TV networks and CNN quickly picked up the report and passed it along. Anyone watching any number of 10 p.m. news broadcasts had every reason to believe the case against Clinton was no longer merely a matter of he said, she said.

The problem is that by the time the Morning News was ready to print its later edition, the source of the story, a longtime Washington lawyer, had told the paper the information was inaccurate, and the Morning News withdrew the report.

But not everyone who heard the first story also heard of its withdrawal. And so the damage -- though unintentional -- had been done. Ten years from now, some people will still be saying, "You know, there was a Secret Service agent who saw Clinton and Monica Lewinsky having sex in the White House, but they hushed the whole thing up, and that guy was never heard from again."

Initial impressions, even when mistaken, are so hard to erase.