The final battle may at last be upon us in the current bizarre and bitter civil war between American journalism and the public.
Journalists continue to remind us hourly that the Monica Lewinsky scandal has the presidency under siege, that the issues swirling around this story are vital to the republic, and that the press are serving us honorably by covering it so avidly and continuously.
We know better. The public continues to say "Nuts!" to the media in survey after survey, poll after poll. For perhaps the first time in modern media history, we have battled to a standoff with our very own institutions of information. It's the polls against the talk shows.
The journalists are battling on. This week, we the public are being told, the seriousness of the situation will finally dawn on us. "If Clinton is found to be lying," Tim Russert asked a guest on Meet the Press, "the public won't stand for it, will they?" The very next day, the newsmagazines reported that the public hasn't changed its position one percentage point, alleged semen stains be damned.
The Monica Lewinsky "scandal" might seem the least likely of battlegrounds for such an epic conflict, but history tells us that we can't pick our watersheds, only shake our heads in wonder when they appear. And this is a watershed. Media historians will look back on it as a time when the mainstream press and the public split off from one another, perhaps for good, each going radically different ways, the fault lines between the two widening.
This is the perhaps inevitable result of years of estrangement between a corporatized, incestuous, and increasingly elitist media, and a public freed by new media technologies to see what they want and say what they want with whomever they please - 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
Washington journalists don't seem to have grasped that in the digital age, we have made our own media and pay less and less attention to theirs. They sputter and fume, but increasingly appear pathetic, trapped in an old reality.
The Lewinsky drama shows us clearly why this is not only inevitable, but necessary.
The public has been almost continuously reviled by Washington journalists since the story broke. "You'd be screaming for Clinton's blood if your W-2 form was lower than last year," MSNBC anchor John Gibson hooted last week at a caller questioning his network's obsessive coverage of the story. "Because your paycheck is high, you don't care what the president does."
Gibson further justified covering the scandal by going on to say that every time MSNBC tries to cover something else, its ratings drop. "If we cover education," he complained, "everybody hits that zapper!" The caller was cut off. I was hoping she'd get a chance to ask Gibson if stories on "serious" news outlets like MSNBC are chosen solely by ratings, what precisely is the difference between MSNBC and the National Enquirer? But then, after a year of Princess Diana and Monica Lewinsky, we know the answer.
Soon, the "panel" was back on, the usual suspects assembled from 10 square blocks of Washington, a person from the "left" shrieking at a person from the "right" and Gibson happily refereeing.
Gibson perfectly, if perhaps unwittingly, expressed the media's - especially the Washington media's - true feelings about the rest of us. Sure, we don't like them, but they are positively contemptuous of us.
As they have it, we are too greedy, ignorant, self-absorbed, hypocritical, or dumb to grasp the profundity of what they're doing, or to see why it - thus they - are so important. After all, don't we watch and read these stories, even as we condemn the press for airing and printing them?
Why don't we simply accept that journalists know more than we do and better grasp the sophisticated issues involved? Why don't we appear to be in crisis?
Washington journalists seem blissfully unaware of how much the rest of the country is coming to hate them and their warped value system. Scholars of government tell us that the very nature of the presidency has been fundamentally altered by this conflict, not by any vote, referendum, or public debate but by a handful of Washington lawyers, politicians, and journalists gorging on their own self-importance and lack of perspective. We see this story not as a serious matter of public policy, but for what it is: a uniquely American version of the coup d'état, conducted not by generals with tanks but by journalists, lawyers, and lobbyists using TV cameras and microphones.
It's difficult to tally the real damage of this strange period - the bills that weren't passed, the programs delayed, the issues that weren't faced or discussed, let alone resolved.
The shared belief that human beings are entitled to zones of privacy is one of the many real casualties of the Lewinsky drama, one that journalism has advanced rather than questioned. Our book purchases, clothes, phone messages, letters, email have all been ratified as potential evidence, expressions that can be seized, leaked, and disseminated, even when the crime in question is nothing more than choosing to hide a private, legal sexual act.
Journalists have not only turned a blind eye to the legitimization of these personal invasions, they are likely to be carrying them out, permitting themselves to be manipulated by book agents, prosecutors, lawyers, and anonymous sources.
If journalists, part of an institution historically charged with curbing governmental abuse of power, don't fight for our privacy, but join forces with law enforcement to take it away, who exactly is supposed to protect us?
For years now, the journalistic and public agendas have diverged. As Gibson so adroitly showed, the press operates just the way cereal manufacturers do - by the numbers. Media's ideology no longer has to do with morals or values. The ideology of the press is mass-marketing. Journalists and their consumers have become separated by a widening range of class issues and value differences.
And as Washington journalism has grown too large, self-righteous, powerful, and disconnected, it has become a civic menace all its own, helping to turn Washington into a place of inquisitions, distractions, leaks, sex policing, the most personal intrusions, and mob-like assaults on the private lives of public people. This is a process few people can survive and fewer and fewer want to brave at all.
But here's the remarkable thing about the Lewinsky drama: The public, bombarded daily by Op-Ed columnists, commentators, pundits, and Washington reporters telling us how stupid and greedy we are, has held its ground. The center holds, even solidifies. The press seems to have forgotten that its power - like that of presidents - is tenuous. It is, ultimately, no stronger or weaker than the public's support for it.
"I have an idea," Joe3R, a Yale law student, emailed two weeks ago. "Why don't we start our own revolution, but this time against the process, against the media?"
I wrote back that we already have, and his message was an expression and manifestation of it.
Here on the Web, we can - and do - hide and retreat from this madness. We are creating our own media, having our own discussions, expressing our own opinions, out of sight and mind of the arrogant people who have turned Washington into a civic disaster site.
In the next few weeks, the president either will or won't give his mea culpa, and the scandal either will or won't go away. In the sense in which the story is being covered, there can't be any Washington winners - certainly not Clinton or Starr, who deserve to be thrown together on a desert island for a decade or two.
Contemporary media will pay a real price for their arrogance, obliviousness, and self-importance. When the smoke finally clears, the smug talk show commentators may be shocked at who turns out to be the real casualties of this nasty struggle.
