`PRIMARY COLORS' CONFESSION LEAVES SOME SEEING RED : WRITER'S DENIAL OF AUTHORING BOOK BRINGS SWARM OF ETHICAL QUESTIONS.

Byline: Iver Peterson The New York Times

Now that Joe Klein has come clean and admitted that he was the Anonymous behind ``Primary Colors,'' a more complicated question takes the place of the original hunt for the writer, at least among reporters and editors.

The question is, is Klein somehow morally or ethically at fault for not only denying his authorship, but going out of his way to deny it? And what is the ethical position of Newsweek, whose editor, Maynard Parker, was in on the secret from the start, yet not only kept it out of his magazine, but kept one of his own reporters in the dark when the reporter wrote one of the magazine's few brief pieces on the year's most delicious literary mystery?

How much the answers to these questions matter seems to depend in part on how close to the profession the speaker stands.

Stephen Hess, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who follows government and media issues, but is not a journalist, was more amused than dismayed by the uproar. But Kevin Smith, a working reporter and chairman of the ethics committee of the Society of Professional Journalists, said he was deeply alarmed that a reporter and his editor would deceive their colleagues and the public about a running story.

To others, the question was one of Klein's role: If Klein was lying as a reporter, that was bad, but if he was lying as a business person engaged in commerce - in promoting a book in this case - the lie may not have been so bad.

``Look, people lie to reporters every day,'' Hess said. ``What annoys journalists is that this was a member of their community, a friend of theirs. Since I am not a journalist, and Klein is not a friend of mine, I am no more offended by his lying than I would be if the president of the widget corporation lied to protect his patent.''

But Smith and several others reject Hess's notion of a kind of commercial veil for Klein's deception. They believe journalists do not shed their particular obligations when they leave the newsroom.

``My personal feeling is that you make certain sacrifices in your life to conduct your job as a journalist,'' said Smith, who is a professor of journalism at Miami University in Ohio, and who spends his summers as a reporter at The Dominion Post in Morgantown, W.Va., a daily.

``You do not run for office, you do not belong to organizations that will be seeking favors from you, and you never give up your obligation to deal truthfully with people, whether you are working on a story or in your personal life. So I think Mr. Klein has lost credibility here, and that hurts all of us.''

Klein, the author, disagrees. He maintains that the double-deception in the unsigned novel and in his subsequent denials are outside his role as a journalist.

``I think I have an obligation to be truthful in all matters that relate to my role as a columnist for Newsweek or as a commentator for CBS and I think that I have been,'' he said in an interview. ``I also had an obligation to Random House and to myself and to the integrity of this project.''

Some of the people critical of Klein's concealment of his identity point to the occasional vehemence of his denials, and the fact that he did not resort to the kinds of wiggle-words and evasions that politicians often find handy when cornered. In February, questioned by a reporter for The New York Times, Klein declared, ``For God's sake, definitely, I didn't write it.''

Parker conceded Wednesday that he might have done a few things differently, but insisted in a wider sense that the brouhaha was ``a summer diversion.''

``In the middle of things I told him, `Gee, maybe you shouldn't be quite as categorical as you're being,' and I think he probably thought that way,'' Parker said. And perhaps, Parker said, Newsweek should have killed or postponed a short Periscope piece by Jonathan Alter, Newsweek's press critic, that speculated on several possible authors of the book without mentioning Klein. The piece was Newsweek's entire unsigned coverage of the hunt for the author.

``If I'm going to be hung out to dry on a two-paragraph (Periscope) item, so be it, but the fact is that's all we did,'' Parker said.

Suzanne Braun Levine, editor of the Columbia Journalism Review, said that if Klein had betrayed anyone, it was his colleagues.

``Journalists think of themselves as a fraternity,'' she said, ``and that journalists are straight with each other even if nobody is straight with them. They are extremely sensitive to being criticized or being duped. And what could be worse than being duped by one of your own?''