WASHINGTON, D.C., Nov. 7 (DPI Commentary) — Ever since the flap over Herman Cain’s record as an alleged sex harasser broke, I’m reminded of a scene from the movie All The President’s Men:

Woodward and Bernstein anxiously pitched one of their first Watergate stories to Ben Bradlee, the curmudgeonly, conscientious editor of The Washington Post:

“Not good enough,” Bradlee told his young reporters. “Get some harder information next time. You haven’t got it.”

Bradlee dismissed the shell-shocked rookies with a wave of his hand.

Too bad Jason Martin of the free newspaper Politico never had such an editor: There’d be a lot less confusion now about what Herman Cain did — or did not do — some 12 years ago.

In a real newsroom, in the old days, before editors were dismissed in droves as old and irrelevant, before all the people who could spell and write correct grammar were sent out to pasture through buy-outs, somebody somewhere would have asked that question — before the incomplete Politico story was published.

I have no problem with such a story, when it’s complete.  Everything in a major candidate’s resume is fair game. You need a hippo’s hide to survive the gauntlet that is the Presidential primaries.  The only problem here was that Politico either had no idea, or didn’t want to tell its readers, what it was that Herman Cain had done.

Okay, twelve years ago, a couple of women complained about his behavior.  And what was that behavior, that supposedly is so offensive?

“I was told by this guy,” Woodward began in his reply to Bradlee.

“How senior?” Bradlee wanted to know.

Woodward didn’t know. The story was spiked, for the moment.

Politico was apparently told by “this guy” about these complaints. We are satisfied that there were two complaints.  But that in itself is hardly news. According to the EEOC, some 12,000 sex harassment complaints are filed with the agency each year. At least that many are filed every year with human resource officers at the various companies in the United States big enough to have such personnel.

It’s possible that having just two complaints against you, as an executive of a big operation, may actually be a low number. But Politico provided no context for that.

So the fact that two complaints were filed against the head of a fairly minor Washington-based association is interesting, but not necessarily surprising.

Unless you know, and want to tell, exactly what was in the complaint, you need to go back and get some harder information.

Unfortunately once the cable networks get hold of an incomplete story, it’s like lit kerosene. Never mind that no one knows what Cain is alleged to have done. Guests come on asking why it is that just now two women have decided to come forward, that Cain kept an apartment for his trysts, that he groped someone at a dinner in Crystal City. The story is new, but what is contained in it is so old. Maybe Herman got loaded at a dinner, did or said something he regretted, but didn’t sin again for the last 12 years. Couldn’t that be forgiven?

There is a reason that the story was “broken” by Politico.  My guess is that none of the legitimate papers, the New York Times or the Washington Post, could confirm the details of the story. It wasn’t ready yet to be published, lacking the vital central question of what it was Cain had actually done.  Politico, however, didn’t seem to care.  A scrappy new paper anxious to attract eyeballs to its Web pages, they can just go again and publish, knowing that the cable outlets will handle their publicity.

The Herman Cain story is offensive for another reason.  A reporter is not supposed to get emotionally involved in the story. And the reporter is not supposed to be out on the airwaves, cable TV style, demanding that people be arrested or not.  The reporter’s job is to write the story and lay it out there, providing both sides.

You are not supposed to be appearing on cable the next day patting yourself on the back and joining the send-him-up-the-river chorus.

Once having run with the story, Politico reporters should have been too busy to appear on cable: They should have been working 24/7 on a follow up, hopefully one that would have filled in all the missing details from the first story.

Some “harder information” would help.

(Kim Eisler is the National Editor of Digital Press International. He is the author of four books on the law, law firms and politics.)