Word: robbs
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...competition for advertising spins out of control, the mainstream press is increasingly willing to feed lower on the news chain. This spring NBC News anchor Tom Brokaw, slumming as host of a prime-time show called Expose, dusted off a seven-year-old story alleging that Virginia Senator Charles Robb had spent an evening at a hotel with a former beauty queen and attended parties where drugs were used. Once it knew that Brokaw was going with the story, the Washington Post, which had decided against running it before, took the clothespin off its nose and played the story...
...Virginia Governor's never-ending feud with Chuck Robb makes him look like a vindictive spoiler...
Wrong on both counts. Robb won easily, and Wilder, ever flexible, used the new Senator's warm words of support in a campaign commercial. Meanwhile, the unsolicited tape showed up at Robb's office. Both federal and Virginia statutes prohibit covert intercepts as well as dissemination of their contents. Robb said he viewed the tape as "political gossip" rather than a legal land mine. In any event, he said, he had ordered the contents kept secret...
...April a new flash point arose between Robb and Wilder. As NBC prepared a flimsy documentary on Robb's private behavior, including an alleged dalliance with a former Miss Virginia beauty queen, the Robb camp accused Wilder's crew of complicity in the muckraking. The apparent strategy was to paint the expose as resulting from a political vendetta. According to two sources familiar with the episode, two Robb associates -- his press secretary, Steven Johnson, and the political director of Robb's Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, Robert Watson -- briefed a Washington Post reporter on the tape's contents about two months...
What happened next is still unclear, but Robb's people became uneasy about having the tape and destroyed it. A transcript survived, however, as did at least one other copy of the tape made by the original eavesdropper. The Richmond gossip circuit became aware of the material, causing Wilder, while on a trip to Europe, to break the story in a phone interview with the Post. It was a shrewd ploy by the Governor, moving attention from the content of the tape to Robb's possession of it and portraying Wilder as the "victim" of a crime...