It was a fantastic laboratory test, done as if to order. On Monday, Howard Kurtz wrote in The Washington Post, in an article headed “For ‘Gotcha’ Reporting the Getting’s Not So Good,” that scandal-mania in the media was not being successfully transmitted to media consumers and especially to voters, who are told with some regularity that candidates for public office are concealing discreditable information about themselves. “What if bad press no longer matters?” he wondered. His examples included General Wesley Clark, who made what some in the press saw as a disastrous first step in his campaign for the Democratic Presidential nomination when he said, first, that he would have voted for the war in Iraq and then, less than twenty-four hours later, that he “never” would have done so. Likewise, Governor Howard Dean, another candidate for the Democratic nomination, was slammed by a third candidate, Dick Gephardt, for having criticized one of the Democratic party’s sacred cows, Medicare, back in 1995 —charges to which the press gave considerable attention, though no one else seemed to do so. Finally, Arnold Schwarzenegger looked like winning the recall election to replace Governor Gray Davis of California, Kurtz said, “despite an avalanche of negative headlines about his inaccessibility, his lack of specifics and his wild-and-crazy bodybuilding days.”

That was on Monday. On Thursday we found out what a real avalanche looked like. Or, perhaps, as the conservative Media Research Center called it, changing the metaphor, “a perfect storm of anti-conservative