Not that one wishes to minimize the importance of political bias in the media, but it cannot be said often enough—certainly, I have said it more than once—that there is something even more determinative of the direction to be taken by the media’s political coverage than the well-documented tendency of media-folk to vote Democratic. This is the need to find, particularly in election years, congenial and compelling stories. News coverage of election campaigns eschews the substantive and concentrates on the trivial, as I noted in these pages last month, not only because it is easier and more fun and more attuned to the essentially trivial political interests of the mass audience, but also because it is out of trivialities that the media culture builds the stories on which it is intellectually dependent.

For an illustration of how this narrative-imperative tends to override even strong political biases, take The Hunting of the Presiden ...