To journalists there could have been little surprise in the announcement that former Vice President Gore was to teach a class in journalism at Columbia. Not only did he have some experience as a hack on the Nashville Tennessean before beginning his stellar political career, but politics and journalism are increasingly intertwined, to the point where they are becoming indistinguishable from one another. I don’t mean just that we are beginning to see journalists becoming politicians (like Pat Buchanan) and politicians—or at least political handlers like George Stephanopolous or Mary Matalin—becoming journalists. This kind of thing will undoubtedly become more familiar, as we can tell from the case of Miss Matalin, whose return from television to the new Bush administration portends more going back and forth between governing and covering government.

But the distinction between journalists and politicians, at least at the top ...

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