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Because it consistently made news, by 1988 the show, in addition to being shown on the six Fox stations, was being syndicated to more than 100 stations around the country to a total of 9 million homes. The
Atlanta Constitution
called it “the juggernaut of tabloid TV” and the networks, faced with declining audiences, found themselves imitating the tabloids in order to compete. ABC, for example, used what it called “dramatization”—nothing more than
A Current Affair’s
“reenactments”—to tell the story of the diplomat Felix Bloch, who was accused of spying for the Soviet Union. But the network, still bound by its traditional ethics, felt uncomfortable with the segment and Peter Jennings delivered an on-air apology for it.

A Current Affair’s
critics were of course legion. “The tabloid television shows have absolutely blurred the distinction … between news and titillation,” Conrad Fink, a journalism professor at the University of Georgia, told the
Constitution.
“This creates
a real problem. It confuses the public on who is a journalist and what is the role of journalism.” The program’s staff found such complaints tedious. “We wanted to do emotional stories and people stories,” Peter Brennan, producer of Fox Television, said in 1989, “and not screw around with language or try to save the world or be Dan Rather.”

But the critics were not limited to journalism professors. The moguls behind some of the programs were increasingly facing the wrath of friends and business partners who were being skewered by the shows. Barry Diller, who as head of Fox, Inc., was in charge of all programming and movies, was reportedly irritated by the show, if only because of its irreverent pieces on the private lives of the celebrities with whom he was trying to do movie deals. Diller was upset after
A Current Affair
ran a story on the rocky marriage of his good friend Sid Bass, who was in the process of dumping his wife Ann for Mercedes Kellogg. And, sources say director Steven Spielberg was incensed when
A Current Affair
ran a story, complete with background music from “Jaws,” on his divorce from actress Amy Irving and his subsequent romance with actress Kate Capshaw. Spielberg reportedly called Diller and threatened never to work with him again.

And in 1990, a man named Stuart Goldman was arrested and led away in handcuffs for infiltrating
A Current Affair.
Posing as a producer, he had tracked down the tabloid’s methodology; the word was that he was hired by a group of movie stars. He was celebrated by them; Oliver Stone reportedly optioned the movie rights to his story and Tom Cruise was interested in playing the lead.

But Murdoch, with decades of experience in dealing with powerful people his journalists had infuriated, refused to interfere.
A Current Affair’s
real problems were brought about by its success. Just as the huge circulation of the
National Enquirer
in the early seventies produced a host of imitators, so too did the mass audience of
A Current Affair
spawn electronic competition. In 1988, Roger King, whose syndication company King World produced
Oprah
and
Wheel of Fortune,
lured away two producers from
A Current Affair
—Murdoch, wanting to keep costs down, had put hardly any of the staff under contract—to start
Inside
Edition.
The next year, Paramount started
Hard Copy.
“This is wild,” Bill O’Reilly, host of
Inside Edition,
told the
Wall Street Journal
in 1989. “It’s a shoot-out. It’s the O.K. Corral.”

The three programs were competing not just for staff but for stories. And the producers and reporters knew that, as in any tabloid war, victory goes to the most sensational. The first great battle in that war would take place in Palm Beach in 1991, when Patricia Bowman accused Willie Smith of raping her on a moonlit night on the lawn of the Kennedy family’s oceanfront mansion—a news event in which for the first time the tabloid press not only competed with one another but drove the coverage for the entire media establishment. “We were the most watched newscast in the country,” said Povich. “We relied on the great Shakespearean themes of revenge and violence and lust and betrayal. So the heads of the network news divisions realized that it’s not just news about Washington and international news. And they began to chase the stories that dealt with these themes of lust and violence and revenge.”

“One, two, William Kennedy Smith. William Kennedy Smith. William Kennedy Smith.” Steve Dunleavy, standing on a ladder just outside the courthouse in West Palm Beach, in a surging crowd of reporters, photographers, camera crews, and spectators, was giving a sound check. “William Kennedy Smith,” he repeated. “William Kennedy Smith.”

The maroon Mercury station wagon owned by Jean Kennedy Smith, the sister of Ted Kennedy and the mother of William Kennedy Smith, turned down the street and came to a stop at the curb. The police restrained the crowd behind barricades. William Kennedy Smith, the pale, slightly pudgy medical student and accused rapist, climbed out of the car. Wearing slacks and a brown tweed sport coat, his face blankly amiable, he nodded at the crowd, then turned toward the contemporary brick building.

“Eight forty-six!” shouted Cynthia Fagen, Dunleavy’s co-producer and one of ten
Current Affair
staffers assigned to cover the trial.

“Eight what?” asked Dunleavy.

“Eight forty-six.”

“Okay.”

“Go for it!” a crew member shouted.

Dunleavy looked into the camera and then, in his gravelly Australian drawl, a voice that managed to be at once snide and sanctimonious, he intoned, “William Kennedy Smith arrived at court today at eight-forty
A.M
., on the first day of his sensational rape trial. Outwardly he looks calm and confident, but now he faces some rough going as prosecution witnesses take the stand. I have spoken,
exclusively,
to one of those witnesses, who told me of the state of mind of the alleged victim and just how tough it’s going to be for Mr. Smith!”

“Every famous trial has its chronicler,” David Margolick, a reporter for the
New York Times,
would write a few days later, once the verdict was in. “The Scopes trial had H. L. Mencken, the Eichmann trial Hannah Arendt, and the just concluded rape trial of William Kennedy Smith had Steve Dunleavy.” Indeed, Dunleavy, and
A Current Affair,
not only provided the definitive coverage of the trial, they influenced its outcome in a way that may have been unprecedented in legal history, and in doing so permanently redrew—and in the view of some, obliterated—the lines between the tabloid and the establishment press. “We wanted to own that story,” said John Terenzio, the program’s executive producer. They did.

What came to be known as “The William Kennedy Smith Rape Case”—even though Smith never used his middle name—was initially broken by freelance journalist Malcolm Balfour, a native South African and former
National Enquirer
reporter who worked out of a duplex apartment down the street from his old employer in the heart of Tabloid Valley. Although his office was cluttered with stacks of newspapers spilling from filing cabinets and the closet, and he could often be found in shorts and no socks at a battered metal desk, Balfour hardly fit the image of a struggling freelancer. He had ties to half a dozen British tabloids, as well as papers in Germany and Australia and the
New York Post,
and he could resell a single small item to any number of these publications, multiplying his earnings and turning him into, in effect, a one-man gossip syndicate. The living he made enabled him to drive a Mercedes, pilot his own airplane, put his two
children through college, invest in real estate, and return to South Africa once a year.

Balfour, who had worked in Tabloid Valley since 1972 and who had been sued by Roxanne Pulitzer after reporting the details of her sex life in the
New York Post
under the famous headline “I SLEPT WITH A TRUMPET,” had sources among the other journalists there, and among the criminal defense lawyers and law enforcement officers who could be found in the courts and police stations of South Florida. Within hours after Patricia Bowman had told investigators at the sheriff’s office in West Palm Beach that William Smith had raped her, Balfour heard about the story from what he describes as a “police source” and filed it to the
Post,
which beat the competition by six hours with a story headlined “Kennedy Mansion Sex Probe.”

The media began pouring into Palm Beach the next day. Among the 500 print and television reporters who descended on the scene was Steve Dunleavy, his two producers, and a camera crew from
A Current Affair.
They booked rooms in the Brazilian Court Hotel, which was favored by the tabloid press, and Dunleavy, an old nemesis of the Kennedys who had once written a book called
The Wild, Wild Kennedy Boys,
put Balfour on retainer, and the two began scouring Palm Beach, offering “finder’s fees” for tips.

It was just as important to the mainstream press, and, as the case unwound, the distinction between the tabloid and the establishment did begin to collapse. In the most controversial incident, a British tabloid, the
London Mirror,
published Patricia Bowman’s name and photograph, leading an American tabloid, the
Globe,
to do the same. This led
NBC Nightly News
anchor Tom Brokaw to use her name, on the grounds that it had already been made public, and that, in turn, decided the editors of the
New York Times
to do the same. Just as significant as an indicator of the collapsing distinction between tabloid and mainstream was that the article in which Bowman’s name appeared, an extremely critical profile taking her to task for her “wild streak,” was written by Fox Butterfield, a
Times
reporter in Boston who had no logical territorial connection to a Florida rape story but who did have
strong connections to the Kennedy camp. Furthermore, the article contained, in true tabloid fashion, anonymous quotes, a description of the books on the shelf of Bowman’s two-year-old daughter obtained by peering through her window, and material that some believe was supplied to Butterfield by Anthony Pellicano, a private investigator who was hired by celebrities and reportedly worked for the Kennedys.

The article caused a furor, both nationally and within the
Times.
Editorial writers at other papers castigated its editors. At a meeting attended by more than 300 reporters, people filled the
Times’
s auditorium and lined the aisles. Up front,
Times
editor Max Frankel, who had been in favor of publishing the victim’s name even before NBC News broadcast it because he felt it unfair that Willie Smith’s reputation should be damaged while she remained anonymous, received the brunt of the attacks. One female reporter said, “We don’t understand why you’ve got
New York Times
reporters peeping in windows.” Another complained the paper had “crucified” Bowman. A third described the article as “tabloid journalism.” When nation section editor Soma Golden, who was standing with Frankel, said people who found fault with the article had “weird minds,” many in the audience hissed, and one reporter responded, “The people with the weird minds are the ones who thought this was journalism.”

Frankel defended his decision by pointing to NBC; one of the paper’s columnists asked why the
Times
would rely on the judgment of others and wondered where the line would be drawn—at
Hard Copy
or MTV? “We’ll know it when we see it,” Frankel replied. By the end of the day, however, Frankel was retreating. A few days later, the editors published an “editor’s note” regretting the article, but laying most of the blame for it on Butterfield. The editors of the
New York Times
appeared to have become completely disoriented. And indeed, Soma Golden told the
Washington Post
that the incident was “the most troubling time of my career.” Dan Schwartz, editor of the
National Enquirer,
which had thoroughly reported the story without naming Bowman, said of the
New York Times,
“I think we took a more ethical stand than they did.”

Willie Smith’s uncle, Ted Kennedy, and his cousin Patrick, the Senator’s son, had also been at the mansion the night the alleged rape took place but they could be expected to back up Willie’s story. The other two crucial witnesses were Anne Mercer, a friend of the victim’s who had gone with her to Au Bar, the nightclub where she met Willie Smith, and Michelle Cassone, a young off-duty waitress whom Patrick Kennedy had met at Au Bar that same night and had brought back to the family mansion. Among the journalists arriving in Palm Beach in the days after the report was filed, the competition to nail down the first exclusive from either of these witnesses, and from the victim herself, was intense.

At this time, not only were tabloid news organizations paying for interviews, they had vastly increased the amounts they could afford to pay by putting together consortiums—groups of news organizations from different parts of the world who would contribute to the payoff in exchange for exclusive rights to the interview in their geographical region.
Hard Copy,
having put together one such consortium with participating media from as far away as Australia, offered Bowman’s attorney, David Roth, $500,000 for an exclusive with the victim and was prepared to go as high as $1 million.