Collectively called Whitewater, the loosely connected set of allegations of financial impropriety against President and Mrs. Clinton during their years in Arkansas politics may prove to be the first truly postmodern scandal. Who knows or can even imagine knowing the truth behind it all? But certainly it is an unparalleled illustration of the contemporary truism that a story which appears with any degree of frequency in the news media eventually becomes a story about the news media. Where Watergate took more than a year and a presidential resignation to metamorphose from a tale of political wrongdoing into one of journalistic heroism, the flow of Whitewater slowed and diffused into the stagnant swamps of journalistic partisanship and self-doubt in less than three months.

Even as the press was peering most intently into the Clintons’ behavior in the past, it had one eye trained on its own in the present. There was, of course, the tabloid war between the New York Post and the Daily News over investigations into the case of Vincent Foster. The Post darkly hinted that Foster’s death had not been all that it at first appeared to be—they began referring to his “suicide” in scare quotes—and that, therefore, tangentially related Whitewater matters might also be much less innocent than they looked; the Daily News scoffed that Foster’s death was an open-and-shut case. Meanwhile, The Washington Times, which led the way in investigating skulduggery at the Madison Savings and Loan and the Rose Law Firm, was