It is not easy to get The New York Times to print some of the news that’s fit to print. Accuracy in media has been trying for months to get this highly influential paper to tell its reader about a serious case of sexual harassment involving a young woman names Paula Jones. What makes Paula’s story highly newsworthy is the identity of the man she accuses of subjecting her to outrageous sexual advances when she was his employee.

That man is now the President of the United States. Our big media organizations, including The New York Times, The Washington Post and the television networks, have all been extremely reticent to tell their readers or listeners about Paula Jones’s charges, not because they believe them to be false, but because she has provided such impressive evidence that they are true.

Adm. Frank Kelso, the Navy’s top officer, has been forced into retirement and is now threatened with losing two of his four stars because he allegedly failed to restrain bawdy Naval aviators at the 1991 Tailhook Convention. With such a rebuke being administered to Adm. Kelso, not to mention some 50n lower ranking officers have been disciplined for misbehavior at Tailhook 91, what do you do about the Commander-in-Chief if it is established that in 1991 he was guilty of far worse behavior toward Paula Jones than anything Adm. Kelso and other Navy officers have been accused of doing?

The Chairman of the Board of The New York Times, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, faced this dilemma at the annual meeting of his shareholders on April19. That morning, The Time ran a front-page story saying that six of the seven women in the U.S. Senate had said they would vote against allowing Adm. Kelso to retire with his four stars because “of his role in Tailhook scandal.”

The Times said, “The six Senators said that allowing Adm. Kelso to end his 38-year naval career with four stars would send the wrong message to the Navy and to the American public, namely that the Senate somehow condoned the bawdy behavior at the 1991 aviators convention, where, the Navy reported, more than 80 women were assaulted.”

The assault that elevated Tailhook to a national scandal was the claims by Lt. Paula Coughlin that someone had grabbed her buttocks and her breasts as she made her way down a hotel corridor crowded with drunken naval officers. Lt. Coughlin accused Marine Capt. Gregory Bonam of this assault, and he was promptly threatened with a court-martial that could have resulted in dismissal from the service and a jail sentence. Bonam was spared that fate when it became clear at a hearing that he didn’t fir the description that Lt. Coughlin had given Navy investigators.

The Times told how Adm. Kelso had been retired and is now faced with a reduction in rank because he didn’t prevent such atrocious behavior from taking place. But back on the Op-ed page in the same issue readers were informed that Gov. Bill Clinton had directed a state trooper to bring Paula Jones, a state employee, to see him in a private room, where he made sexual advances that began with touching and culminating in lowering his trousers, exposing himself and asking her to perform oral sex. She rebuffed him and escaped from the room, but the governor warned her not to tell anyone what he had done. She disregarded that warning and told a co-worker, a close friend and her family.

This information was in the Times only because Accuracy in Media, fed up with the refusal of the paper to report this story or even to permit AIM to tell it in a letter to the editor, bought the space to tell Paula’s story and how the Times was stonewalling. It appeared on the morning that shareholders of the New York Times gathered in Boston for their annual meeting. Chairman of the Board Sulzberger was faced with question that we posed about the failure of the Times to investigate and report this story. Mr. Sulzberger acknowledged that the charges made by Paula were “substantial.” He could not deny that she had provided strong substantiation. He was unable to explain why the Times had not treated this as an important news story and had even refused to publish a letter about it.

Liberal columnist Mickey Kaus has given this simple explanation: “Few journalists want to see the President crippled ….” The Big Media, to paraphrase the Bard, want us to believe that what is flat blasphemy when uttered by a sailor, or even an admiral, is but a choleric word from the lips of the Commander-in-Chief.

Reed Irvine can be reached at ri@AIM.org.