Make the call:

Participate in on our online straw poll below!

Should Bay Area papers have picked up the late-night Los Angeles Times story on sexual assault allegations against Arnold Schwarzenegger for the next day’s paper?

Photo credit: Stephan Savoia, AP

Reporting by Michael Stoll
Posted October 3, 2003

Consider yourself the executive editor.

It’s 9:30 at night on Oct. 2, 2003, just five days before the recall election for California’s governor. Another edition of the newspaper is being put to bed. Suddenly, an advisory comes across the Los Angeles Times news wire: Six women, four of them anonymous, accuse gubernatorial candidate Arnold Schwarzenegger of having groped or otherwise sexually harassed them between 1975 and 2000. The full story will come later that night.

Your job is to empower citizens to make a wise choice in the California recall election. But…
• Do you trust a story with such explosive claims that your staff had no hand in gathering?
• If so, do you publish a reputation-hammering story based mostly on anonymous sources, none of whom reported these incidents to police?
• Do charges of sexual harassment necessarily affect a candidate’s fitness for office?

We’ve assembled two opposing arguments on the issue. Read them both, then think about how you’d make the call. When you’ve decided, click on our online poll, and find out how others voted. Then check out how the major papers in the Bay Area and beyond handled the story. Ready?

What do you think? Discuss it in The Coffeehouse.

This site is supported and maintained by the Grade the News project team.

Feel free to disseminate, but please attribute and link to us.