It's hard to kill a good story. Especially when the
                             story is the talk of the Washington press corps.
                             Even if it is a story that has no basis in fact, it could live forever.

                             So it is with Bill and Hillary's gift registry. My guess
                             is that years from now after some future president
                             leaves office, reporters will dig into their electronic
                             archives and repeat the story about how the Clintons
                             got their friends to send them goodies for their new
                             homes and offices from a registry they set up "like
                             newlyweds" before they exited the White House.

                             You no doubt have heard it. Many of the professional
                             political talkers on the weekend shows have been jabbering about it.

                             Problem is, the story is fiction.
                       It didn't happen.

                             Oh, the Clintons got gifts, that's well established.
                             And a lot of them came from their lobbyist and
                             fund-raising friends. It's just the registry thing --- the
                             little tidbit in the story that gave it the legs it needed
                             to move beyond reporting and on to the windbag TV
                             punditry circles and then eventually into the popular culture
                             of late-night monologues --- that registry thing wasn't true.

                             We got caught in the frenzy ourselves. The Journal-Constitution Washington
                             Bureau mentioned the registry in a Sunday story about how former occupants
                             of the White House have to deal with thousands of gifts large and small sent to
                             them by influence peddlers as well as common citizens. We ran a correction
                             on the mistake on Tuesday.

                             According to Salon.com's political reporting site, the registry story may have
                             started with The New York Times' Maureen Dowd. In a late December column,
                             Dowd mentioned that Hillary Clinton registered "like a new bride" with one of
                             her favorite mail-order houses in Nebraska so that her friends would know what
                             to send. But when the local paper in Omaha checked with the store, it turned
                             out that wasn't the case.

                             By then it was too late, the registry story had its legs and it was off to the
                             media races. NBC News repeated it in mid-January, and The Associated
                             Press wrote a story that we used a day later even though the store and others
                             quoted in the story said it wasn't true.

                             (Dowd --- as you may have noticed from the Constitution's Viewpoints page,
                             which sometimes uses her columns --- enjoys tongue-in-cheek writing. The
                             day before George W. Bush's inauguration last month, the Constitution
                             published a column where she made up quotes from an inaugural planner
                             about how the Bush campaign wanted a return-to-the-Confederacy theme for
                             the festivities. It was intended to be funny. Some readers took it seriously. I
                             had to tell them it was a joke, just not a very good one.)

                             The Clinton registry story is similar to one that wouldn't go away during the
                             presidential campaign of 2000 --- the often repeated references to Al Gore
                             having once said he "invented the Internet." The Internet claim was usually
                             included in background stories about Gore's character, complete with commentary
                             about why he appeared to take credit for things that weren't his to claim.

                             Except that he never actually said he invented the Internet. What he said --- on
                             several occasions and with different audiences --- was that he was among the
                             first in Congress to realize the potential of the Internet and to force the
                             government to deal with its development.

                             And, it's worth pointing out here to those of you who think we reserve such
                             sloppiness for Republicans, that these are Democrats who got this treatment
                             from the press.

                             Partisanship on this issue is perhaps the least of our worries. A 1999 survey of
                             readership attitudes toward the press by the American Society of Newspaper
                             Editors showed a startling 73 percent of Americans have become more
                             skeptical of our accuracy, and 68 percent believe newspapers run stories
                             without checking them because other papers have published them, not
                             because they know they're true.

                             The lesson in all this is pretty simple. A basic premise of any good reporter is
                             to check the veracity of a story that sounds too good to be true. Good reporters
                             don't halt that process simply because someone else printed it first. We ought to be
                             as skeptical about our colleagues as we are about everyone else.
 

                             You can contact Mike King by e-mail at insideajc@ajc.com, by phone at
                             404-526-5819, by fax at 404-526-5611 or by writing P.O. Box 4689, Atlanta,
                             GA 30302.