Gone with the windbags
                                                    -----THE ELECTION TOOK SOME OF THE STEAM OUT OF THE
                                                    -----WASHINGTON PUNDITOCRACY'S HOT AIR BALLOON.

                                      The people have spoken. And the sound that emanated from their
                                     collective lips on Tuesday was a resonant, whoopee-cushion-like
                                     effusion aimed directly into the ears not only of the
                                     Bible-thumping wing of the Republican Party but of
                                     the punditocracy -- the pay-by-the-hour windbags,
                                     moralists for hire, Op-Ed Savonarolas and assorted
                                     other dispensers of reddi-whipped political wisdom
                                     and congealed ethical instruction. If they did
                                     nothing else, the midterm election results laid to rest
                                     once and for all the notion that the chattering
                                     classes speak for and to anybody but themselves.

                                     The pundits have been so wrong about so many things and
                                     with such glorious consistency that their record almost inspires awe.
                                     Cast your mind back to last winter, when reports of a Clinton dalliance
                                     first switched the pundit Outrage-O-Meter onto permanent autopilot.
 
                                     There was ABC's Sam Donaldson, intoning to his cronies that
                                     "if he's not telling the truth, I think his presidency is numbered
                                     in days." There was Donaldson's newbie colleague George
                                     Stephanopoulos on the same show, following in the footsteps of
                                     his Beltway Media Club elders with the same cluck-clucking line.

                                     There was right-wing pinup girl Ann Coulter,
                                     arguing for impeachment on the talk shows at the
                                     same time that she was assisting the actual
                                     impeachment effort. There was the New York
                                     Times editorial page, piously donning its black
                                     executioner's hood and mournfully sharpening its ax
                                     in preparation for the bloody, yet necessary, civic
                                     task a Newspaper of Record must sometimes
                                     undertake. There was Times columnist William
                                     Safire, pulling off the admirable feat of being paid
                                     by the newspaper for writing what read like internal
                                     GOP strategy memos. There was the credulous
                                     Washington press corps, chasing after every Starr
                                     handout with visions of Watergate glory dancing
                                     like sugarplums in their heads. And there was the
                                     nation's self-appointed Scolder-in-Chief William
                                     Bennett, elbowing his way to the front of the Bully
                                     Pulpit and exhorting us all to be more outraged.

                                     But not many of us were outraged. In fact, outside
                                     of the pathological cabal of Clinton-haters, that
                                     weird group who are single-handedly carrying on
                                     the paranoid tradition of American politics, few
                                     Americans even cared. The gigantic Wagnerian
                                     gesamtkunstwerk, in which TV, newspapers,
                                     magazines and tabloids all contributed their unique
                                     voices to a cacophony of moral pomposity and
                                     dead-wrong political predictions, was completely
                                     ignored by the public at large.

                                     This only made things worse. With each new
                                     leaked "development," the weird, self-obsessed
                                     dance going on inside the media's opulent little glass
                                     house grew more frenzied. The tapes! The dress!
                                     The video! The cigar! Men in power ties hurled
                                     themselves weirdly through the air. Smoke rose out
                                     of John Gibson's bushy hair. Staid producers
                                     gyrated like Bacchantes, spinmeisters howled in
                                     heat. Outside, people were banging on the walls,
                                     screaming at the crazed masquers to stop it and let
                                     our elected leaders get back to work, but they might
                                     as well have been scruffy transients banging on the
                                     hood of a speeding Lexus.

                                     Finally, the mad fit ended. After the videotape was
                                     released and Clinton's approval ratings went up, the
                                     whole thing deflated like yesterday's party balloon.
                                     The New York Times, which had been calling on
                                     Clinton to admit he lied under oath (a weirdly
                                     vengeful and gratuitous demand, reminiscent of
                                     Maoist "constructive self-criticism" followed by the
                                     firing squad), began easing surreptitiously toward
                                     the exit, even hinting that they might find Kenneth
                                     Starr objectionable for something more serious than
                                     just his poor PR skills. Maureen Dowd turned her
                                     evil eye away from Monica and upon the
                                     independent counsel. The talking heads and
                                     editorialists suddenly embraced a new sobriety, a
                                     note of measured and self-satisfied civic centrism in
                                     which the Voice of the People, once portrayed as
                                     appallingly shallow and materialistic, now rippled
                                     through the wheat fields like a Carl Sandburg
                                     oration. And since no one was taping the pundits'
                                     earlier idiotic utterances, no one accused them of
                                     the journalistic equivalent of malpractice. By the
                                     end of election night, the whole unseemly episode
                                     had been so cleaned up, so sanitized, that it might
                                     as well never have existed.

                                     And so lo and behold, on "Nightline" last night who
                                     should turn up but George Stephanopoulos,
                                     practically choking up as he fed Ted Koppel some
                                     heartwarming inside dish about how the president
                                     spent the evening "camped out in White House
                                     Chief of Staff John Podesta's office hunched over
                                     that computer, pulling up the results one by one by
                                     one in loving fashion and then calling the victors on
                                     the telephone. It's been an amazing night for the
                                     president." Did Koppel ask Stephanopoulos why he
                                     had suddenly become so warm and fuzzy about the
                                     man he had denounced weeks ago as unfit for
                                     office? Of course not. Because this is Pundit Land,
                                     where colleagues don't step on each other's toes
                                     and yesterday's moral outrage magically morphs
                                     into today's "clear-eyed assessment."
 

                                     Of course, not being on the same page as the
                                     people does not necessarily make journalists wrong:
                                     The people are not always right. But the Lewinsky
                                     episode was no case of voices crying in the
                                     wilderness, of lonely press guardians of our civic
                                     virtue trying to wake up a slumbering citizenry. The
                                     facts of the case were never substantially in dispute,
                                     after all -- it was all a matter of interpretation, of
                                     judgment. But on matters of judgment pertaining to
                                     the civic good, in a spectacle-drenched age in which
                                     the elite media have enormous power, one would
                                     hope that at least some of those judgments would
                                     reflect what real people actually believe. And here
                                     the pundits completely failed. It is now clear that
                                     from the very beginning, at least as many people
                                     believed that the Starr investigation was a political
                                     witch hunt as that Clinton should be thrown out --
                                     but until recently, the mainstream media completely
                                     ignored Starr.

                                     How has the elite media fallen so completely out of touch
                                     with the American people? There are several reasons.

                                     First, there is the media's well-chronicled ideological imbalance
                                     -- the McLaughlin Group syndrome, in which talk shows are loaded up
                                     with right-wing commentators and one or two hapless centrists
                                     posing as liberals. Until the media, particularly the TV media, more
                                     accurately reflect the actual spectrum of opinion in this country
                                     (to balance right-wing ideologues like George Will, Fred Barnes,
                                     William Kristol, etc., you'd have to exhume the Fabians),
                                     humiliating debacles like the Lewinsky story will happen again.

                                     Second, there's the structural explanation: money.
                                     Monica Lewinsky was good for ratings; she sold papers, moved
                                     magazines, built Web traffic. Like O.J., the scandal launched entire
                                     shows -- and created, in Keith Olbermann, the world's first
                                     postmodern anchor. You expected Olbermann's
                                     face to come equipped with Derridean footnotes, so
                                     infinitely ironic were his expressions -- and so futile,
                                     as the profitable circus raged on around him.

                                     Third, there is the pundits' peculiarly American
                                     obeisance to puritanism. In fact, I believe that most
                                     pundits do see themselves as speaking in some way
                                     for "the people" -- we are to believe that their
                                     Olympian pronouncements are channeled from
                                     Everyman. But this actually led them to pretend to
                                     be more sanctimonious, more morally censorious,
                                     than they really were. They got all dressed up,
                                     morally speaking, for their "official"
                                     pronouncements. Fearing that it would be suicidal
                                     for them to appear as if they were pooh-poohing
                                     presidential adultery, they were led into a fatal
                                     pomposity. (Of course, some talking heads'
                                     pomposity seems entirely genuine, as in the case of
                                     Cokie Roberts.) Their priggishness made them look
                                     like guidance counselors at an all-night rave. The
                                     country is simply hipper than they thought.

                                     Which leads to the related fourth point: Due to
                                     income, lifestyle, political beliefs and various
                                     professional deformations, the pundit class is
                                     increasingly out of touch with ordinary Americans.
                                     The worst sins of a highly specialized professional
                                     group were exposed in the scandal coverage: the
                                     incestuous insularity, group-think and delusions of
                                     phony "expertise." Lavishly compensated and
                                     ego-inflated, the Tim Russerts and George Willses
                                     of Pundit Land are unbuffeted by the thousand
                                     trials and tribulations that less pampered people
                                     experience, trials that teach them tolerance and
                                     humor. This explains the pundits' bizarre moral
                                     arrogance, their rigid naiveté, their laughable -- and
                                     often hypocritical -- shock, shock,at discovering
                                     that a president had engaged in the oldest sin in the
                                     book. And it also explains some of the visceral
                                     antipathy -- even hatred -- more and more
                                     Americans feel for the media.

                                     Finally, there is just plain old bad journalism. The
                                     real story of the scandal coverage is the failure of
                                     the media to make sophisticated discriminations, to
                                     ask larger questions. It's as if Washington reporters
                                     had decided that to place the scandal story in a
                                     bigger context (asking, for instance, why Starr
                                     should be extending his Whitewater probe into the
                                     president's private life) would be a violation of
                                     journalistic etiquette that would land them outside
                                     the clubby comforts of the Beltway consensus. At a
                                     more mundane level, reporters often just can't see
                                     the forest for the trees. As Washington Post media
                                     columnist Howard Kurtz portrays them in "Spin
                                     Cycle," Beltway journalists are suspicious in the
                                     wrong way -- incapable of distinguishing between
                                     an irrelevant "gotcha" story that will advance their
                                     career and one that has actual significance.

                                     Has the punditocracy learned its lesson? We can
                                     probably expect a little less shrillness in the
                                     upcoming impeachment farce, a little less
                                     harrumphing sanctimony. But nothing is likely to
                                     really change. In an age in which politics,
                                     journalism and show business have begun to merge,
                                     pundits have increasingly become performers, and
                                     performers posture and declaim -- that's what they
                                     do. As long as political commentators, like
                                     sports-radio jocks, are hired on the basis of who
                                     has the loudest, most obnoxiously nasal voice, we'll
                                     be forced to endure their sermons. And as long as
                                     those commentators remain drawn from a stagnant,
                                     inbred pool, those sermons will be inane.
                                     SALON | Nov. 5, 1998
 

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