The media and Anita Hill.

VIEWER RATINGS of the Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill hearings in October 1991 made television history, and the confrontation was surely one of the most media-saturated scandals ever played out in Washington. Once Anita Hill's charges of sexual harassment were leaked to the media, it was, as Senator Alan Simpson put it at the time, "full feeding frenzy."

When the hearings opened on Friday, October 12, reporters were seen lingering outside EEOC headquarters in downtown Washington, offering cash bribes to agency employees for old personnel directories, in an apparent attempt to find other female emloyees of Judge Thomas who could attest to a pattern of such behavior on his part, or who might know something more about Miss Hill's unsubstantiated charges.

Even after the hearings ended and the judge became a Supreme Court Justice, people from at least five major news organizations-including the intrepid Nina Totenberg from National Public Radio-continued this effort. One might have thought that Justice Thomas's bill of health was clean, after four prior Senate confirmations, five FBI checks, and dozens of reporters sifting through his private papers and even stealing into his garage to pore over old books. But the media remained unsated.

Covering judges as politicians, of course, is the unfortunate legacy of the campaign waged by the opponents of Robert Bork in 1987, and it will be said that these reporters were simply doing their jobs. Perhaps so. Journalists are, after all, supposed to be professional skeptics.

The journalistic problem here was more of omission than of commission. When the press continued to dog Justice Thomas for months and found nothing--no "other women," no support for Anita Hill's version of events from third parties, no evidence of his alleged interest in pornography, not one discrepancy in his sworn testimony-their collective news sense should have suggested that there might be problems with Professor Hill's account.

YET THIS is the precise point at which they all closed their notebooks and went on to the next story. Thus the answer to one of the questions I am most frequently asked these days: How was I able to publish a book, two years after the heavily covered events of 1991, that contains so much previously undisclosed information? The answer is that I picked up the story where the journalistic pack left off.

Before turning to Miss Hill herself, let's consider the coverage, or rather the startling absence of coverage, of what should have been a major news story last spring. In May 1992, Peter Fleming, the Senate special counsel who investigated the leak of Miss Hill's charges to the press, reported the results of his five-month probe. While inconclusive on the matter of who actually leaked, the report--according to the Capitol Hill newspaper Roll Call, the only media outlet that thoroughly reported Mr. Fleming's findings-showed how "Senate staffers worked closely with interest groups not merely in an attempt to defeat Thomas but specifically in an effort to bring Hill's charges before the public."

Both the New York Times and the Washington Post ran brief stories on inside pages, dismissing the import of the investigation. Yet it was big news. While it did not address the matter of Miss Hill's truthfulness, the Fleming report nonetheless brought into view for the first time the weeks of scheming and manipulation on the part of liberal Senate staffers and interestgroup leaders to force Miss Hill to testify. It therefore radically altered the view of Anita Hill as a courageous woman who had wrestled with her conscience and finally decided to come forward with the "truth" about Clarence Thomas.

Imagine, for a moment, if the shoe had been on the other foot: In an effort to torpedo a Clinton nominee, aides to Senator Simpson conspired with Paul Weyrich's Free Congress Foundation to coax a piece of uncorroborated dirt out of a completely reluctant witness, broke Senate rules and violated the Privacy Act by leaking the confidential allegation to the Washington Times, and finally lied about all this to a congressional investigator. Would this not be another Iran-Contra?

The identity of the leakers--uncovered for the first time in my book, The Real Anita Hill, as Senator Paul Simon of Illinois and James Brudney, an aide to Senator Howard Metzenbaum who quickly left the Senate staff after the Fleming report was released-also attracted little media interest, though this lapse is more understandable. Reporters thrive on leaks, and have no appetite for exposing those who butter their bread.

The most curious media boycott, however, concerns the accuser herself. The confirmation process had been so thoroughly politicized that the most obvious motive for anyone to try to stop the Thomas nomination was political conviction. Yet the question of Miss Hill's politics was ruled out of order by Judiciary Committee Chairman Joseph Biden.

It was also, apparently, ruled out of order in the nation's newsrooms. The Washington Post published a frontpage profile of Anita Hill that did not once broach the issue of her political views. The Times, meanwhile, reported: "Some of her closest friends here at the University of Oklahoma have trouble remembering any of her political beliefs beyond a deep commitment to the welfare of minority students on campus . .. she seems to have little interest in politics . . . several of her friends were stumped when asked about her private interests and beliefs." (This reportorial lack of interest emanated from the same newspaper that had published an expose of the private life of Patricia Bowman, the Florida woman who had accused William Kennedy Smith of rape. So much for a single standard.)

Other reporters seemed actively to cover up Miss Hill's ideological predispositions. On the air, Miss Totenberg identified Miss Hill as a Reaganite-- though in a subsequent lecture at Stanford University, she stated that if the nation was ever to see someone with views remotely similar to Miss Hill's on the Supreme Court (God help us), we would first have to elect a Democratic President to appoint her. Timothy Phelps, the Newsday reporter who along with Miss Totenberg first broke the story of Miss Hill's allegations, promoted the view that she was an open admirer of the judicial philosophy of Judge Bork.

As I demonstrate amply in my book, Miss Hill is a liberal activist and committed feminist on the Oklahoma campus. This information was easily available to anyone who cared to look. Clippings from the student newspaper, for instance, showed that she was the primary sponsor of a resolution to ban so-called "hate speech" on the campus, one of the more ambitious projects of the politically correct cadres. Why, Miss Hill herself, in interviews last year, revealed that she was a Democrat, that she often took positions antagonistic to those of the Reagan Administration while she was serving in it, and that she did not support Judge Bork on the issues. Somehow, these comments never made it into the dominant press.

WHY, then, did the media miss the story? While the reporters who did not do the story are perhaps best qualified to respond to this question, I can offer some informed speculation. Many in the media regarded Anita Hill as the victim in this case from the moment she burst into the headlines, before knowing anything about her or her allegations. (Should anyone doubt this consult the front-page editorials at the time by Maureen Dowd in the New York Times, promoting the canard that the committee of white men simply didn't take Miss Hill's charge seriously.) This being so, any attempt to assess her credibility or to check into her background was seen as simply victimizing the victim all over again.

Second, and probably more important, is that Miss Hill's allegations came to represent something much larger than whether or not Clarence Thomas sexually harassed her. Her testimony clearly encouraged many other women to come forward with sexual-harassment claims, motivated many (liberal Democratic) women to run for elective office last year, and may even have jump-started the flagging feminist movement. Thus any attempt to get to the bottom of this specific case was seen as a distraction from the more important political objectives--objectives which, it must be said, are shared by the media elite.

Was it a media conspiracy? No, more like a feminist consensus, which may be even more powerful and corrupting of the truth.

Mr. Brock is the author of The Real Anita Hill, recently published by The Free Press, and a writer at The American Spectator.