What a gloriously happy month it has been for the news media! Not
only have they had their way
with quantities of titillating details of the Clinton sex
scandal—each of them yielding up its secret
but reluctantly to the seducer’s touch—they have also had the
sauce to pleasure afforded by their
continual self-flagellation. Hardly had the news broken of Linda
Tripp’s recordings of Monica
Lewinsky’s confessions before conscience-stricken journalists were
professing themselves sick of
the whole business. “The scandal is less than a week old,” wrote
Linton Weeks in the Style
section of The Washington Post, “but already a quiet disgust is
spreading across the land. In the
face of
a round-the-clock onslaught of tidbits and titillations,
many Americans are eager to learn
the truth. But the unsavory details are giving them heartburn.”

On the same page, Tom Shales, the Post’s bigfoot TV critic,
weighed in with a similar
complaint. “Here we are again at rock bottom,” he wrote. “Looks
kind of familiar down here,
doesn’t it? Someday we may find there’s no crawling out again.” His
evidence for this lamentable
degradation was that “once more, as seems to be happening with
greater frequency, the lead story
on ‘Inside Edition’ and ‘Hard Copy’ is the same as the lead story
on ‘The CBS Evening News’!”
Shales was particularly exercised that TV news-chat shows were
interviewing the Internet gossip-monger
Matt Drudge, “as sleazy-looking a character as anyone
involved in the case so far (and
that is saying