KMAX: News of the West

SACRAMENTO (AP) Publishing allegations of a candidate's boorish behavior toward women just days before an election may raise eyebrows among the public, but it isn't unfair, media watchers say.

Five days before the California recall election, voters awoke to a Los Angeles Times report that six women accused Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger of sexually harassing and groping them between 1975 and 2000.

Gregory Favre, distinguished fellow in journalism values at the Poynter Institute, dismissed criticism that the article was timed to inflict the most damage to Schwarzenegger's campaign.

``This was not an easy story to report, obviously,'' Favre said. ``I think in this case, the Los Angeles Times worked very hard over seven weeks to nail down this piece. It just so happened that when they got it finished, it was five days before the election.''

It's a newspaper's obligation to report the story, if it's important, no matter the timing, Favre said.

Although Schwarzenegger immediately apologized to anyone he offended, his campaign charged that the published claims were an attack meant to undermine his candidacy and blamed his political opponents.

Los Angeles Times editor John Carroll defended the timing of the story Thursday, saying it did not learn of the allegations from Schwarzenegger's rivals and his reporters worked for weeks to get the story, then rushed to get it finished to be published in Thursday's edition.

``It simply wasn't ready to go into the paper even a day earlier,'' he said. ``Of course we could have held it until after the election, but we are in the business of reporting information, not concealing it.''

And there's also a competitive element in the business and pitfalls in not reporting known indiscretions, too, a lesson learned by The (Portland) Oregonian in 1992.

The Washington Post published the first report detailing the claims of 10 women who said Oregon Sen. Bob Packwood had subjected them to unwanted sexual advances. It was published two weeks after Packwood's re-election.

Some at The Oregonian knew that Packwood had kissed a female reporter following an interview, and reporters had been pursuing other claims against the senator, but newspaper officials said the story wasn't ready before the election.

``Oregon voters were stunned to learn that they had not received critical information about the senator before making their decision,'' the Oregonian reported in a lengthy 1992 article.

The Oregonian concluded that its own pursuit of the Packwood story wasn't aggressive enough.

Michael Parks, director of the School of Journalism at the University of Southern California's Annenberg School for Communication, said publishing such allegations on Election Day, or the day before might be unfair, but not a week beforehand.

That's information that voters need before voting, not after, said Parks, a former Los Angeles Times editor.

``People need to know who they're voting for. And Schwarzenegger is holding himself up as the anti-political candidate,'' Parks said. ``If he's saying 'I'm morally superior than my opponents,' he is asking voters to judge his character.''

Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne Jr. said he generally thinks last-minute stories are taken lightly by voters, but California's recall is a different kind of race.

``The structure of this race is so strange, it's hard to say'' what impact last-minute charges could have, Dionne said.

In a tight two-way race, lurid allegations can make a difference, Dionne said, citing the 1992 California race between Democrat Barbara Boxer and Republican Bruce Herschensohn.

The two were neck-and-neck in the polls going into the last weekend of the campaign, but Boxer got a boost after a state Democratic Party official disclosed four days before the election that Herschensohn had frequented a nightclub with nude dancers.

``I got a knot in my stomach when I heard these charges against Arnold Schwarzenegger,'' said Herschensohn, now teaching foreign policy at Pepperdine University.

Herschensohn, who endorsed Republican Sen. Tom McClintock for governor, said a last-minute bombshell like this puts a candidate on the defensive in the crucial last days before an election.

``The press will continually ask questions about it. You then become a victim of the defensiveness,'' he said.