Journalism, like epic poetry, is essentially the artful management of cliché, and the art of spin, as the Clinton operation realizes, lies in constantly coming up with new (and, of course, self-serving) clichés with which to feed the journalistic beast. Thus it was that the idea that Kenneth Starr, the independent counsel in the Whitewater case, was “out of control” or “out of bounds” or had “overstepped his bounds” or “overstepped his authority” seemed to occur to every TV news anchor and journalist in the country more or less simultaneously at the beginning of March. It was at about the same time that Starr issued a subpoena to Sidney Blumenthal, sometime journalist and all-time Clinton champion, and the “journalistic community” seemed to feel with equal simultaneity the “chilling effect” on their first amendment freedoms.

I leave it to more fastidious critics than myself to ...

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