Why don’t we elect journalists? Once there may have been a time when the most respectable and authoritative of them truly aspired to that chimera, “objectivity,” but even then such objectivity would have been circumscribed by capitalist, ethnocentric, and patriarchal assumptions as yet unrevealed to us by the modern literary sciences. There is not much point in being even-handed and “fair” (the very idea bespeaks the ethos of sentimental, games-playing British imperialism) as between, say, Republican and Democrat if R and D are merely the Tweedledum and Tweedledee of the decadent, bourgeois, racist, patriarchal power structure. I grant all this. But the more or less unashamed advocacy that has taken the place of a hypocritical attachment to non-partisanship brings with it problems of its own. A parliament of hacks might be the only solution.

The latest illustration of the difficulty is to be found in the journalistic response to what the wags of the press have called Fornigate: the revelations published in The American Spectator just before Christmas about Bill Clinton’s Arkansas sex life. In the interest of obsolete objectivity, I should say that I write for the Spectator, am a friend of its editors, and know slightly David Brock, the author of the piece that sparked the furor. But here my purpose is not just to defend Mr. Brock against his critics (no doubt I won’t be able to help myself), but to examine as dispassionately as possible why he provoked such passion among them. The