Story

Hang around a group of newspaper reporters long enough and eventually one will whine about the superficiality of television news, how it takes you to an event but never tells you how or why you got there.A lot of it comes across, both within journalistic circles and among the public, as jealous carping from people who didn't have the pluck to make it in a very demanding medium, and in many cases, the perception is correct.However, a lot of the local television coverage of the resignation of Davey Johnson last night provided textbook examples of what makes ink-stained wretches kvetch.

WASHINGTON -- Once again, and at Christmastime, no less, America finds itself debating how deeply it should examine the private sexual lives of public officials.The subject this time -- as it was two years ago -- is Bill Clinton.Instead of an alleged former lover, however, his accusers now are four Arkansas state troopers who have told various news organizations that they helped arranged liaisons with various women for then-Governor Clinton as part of their official duties -- affairs that continued until the time he left for the White House.

For Nina Cole Rawlings, yesterday's opening of the Reginald F. Lewis Museum of Maryland African American History and Culture meant a day of mixed emotions. She was overjoyed to see the unveiling of the museum her husband, the late city Del. Howard "Pete" Rawlings, fought so long and so hard for. But she couldn't help feeling sorry that he couldn't be here to enjoy the celebration, or to see the 4,000 people who had bought tickets to tour the museum even before its doors opened officially just before noon.

Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman: 25 Stories Haruki Murakami Alfred A. Knopf / 352 pages / $25.00 In this extraordinary new story collection by the Japanese writer Haruki Murakami (The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Kafka on the Shore), reality is ever in danger of breaking loose of its moorings. People are sucked up into a void or drown in an unforgiving wave. Characters descend into wells. People are pursued by dark shadows. Man-eating cats, or morally indifferent cats, stalk the landscape. No matter the mayhem, there are never "reasons, causes."

Once again in the 1992 presidential campaign, the press confronts the question of when a rumor becomes a story."Reports about this woman have been around for some time," Reese Cleghorn, dean of the University of Maryland's College of Journalism, said of allegations that President Bush had had an affair with a longtime aide.When those allegations made it to the printed page of a book, then to the front page of the New York Post, it was enough for Mary Tillotson of Cable News Network. She asked the president about the alleged affair at a news conference yesterday morning.

WASHINGTON -- A newspaper reporter, citing the First Amendment press freedom guarantee, refused yesterday to tellSenate investigators who had leaked to him Anita F. Hill's charges of sexual harassment against Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas.Newsday reporter Timothy Phelps emerged from the closed-door question-and-answer session after more than four hours with special counsel Peter E. Fleming Jr. Mr. Phelps said he repeatedly refused toanswer the counsel, who pressed him for his sources and "went over virtually every word I wrote."

I've finally figured it out. The essence of the O.J. case isn't race and it isn't celebrity and it isn't domestic violence and it isn't Court TV.It's endurance.It's about how long a story -- any story -- can remain in our consciousness. So far, the answer seems to be forever.Wednesday marks the second anniversary of the double murder, and two years of O.J. overload. No story since Watergate has stayed with us so long. In no recent story have the characters remained so vivid: Kato, Mark Fuhrman, Johnnie Cochran.

SHORTLY AFTER the Democratic convention in 1988 a "story" surfaced raising a question as to whether Michael S. Dukakis, the party's presidential nominee, might have received psychiatric treatment for emotional depression.There wasn't a shred of truth in it. In fact, the rumor had been started by supporters of political cultist Lyndon H. LaRouche, the same people who had been telling the world for years that Queen Elizabeth was a dope pusher. That rumor, printed in a flier handed out at the Atlanta convention, was pushed along by another that the Detroit News was about to "break a story" on the alleged mental illness.

TO THOSE who have lived and loved jazz, it's as much faith as music: a belief that life's a lot more bearable if you slip your tribulations a few "blue notes." Born from the spirituals and work songs of African-Americans, jazz was brought up in bordellos and mellowed at late-night loft sessions in places like Chicago and New York. It gave a young Louis Armstrong an escape from the inner city, Billie Holiday a voice for unspeakable pain, and it wrote the score for the Great Migration of blacks to Northern cities.

For more than a decade, Deli Strummer was one of Baltimore's most active public speakers on the Holocaust. In schools, in churches and even on local television, she captivated audiences with harrowing descriptions of concentration camp life and narrow escapes from death. But there is a problem: Her story is not completely true. Now, citing a review by top Holocaust experts that exposed innumerable inaccuracies in Strummer's oft-told accounts, the influential Baltimore Jewish Council has removed the 78-year-old Towson woman from its list of recommended speakers on the Holocaust and has advised area schools to do the same.