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 criticize the media
for their reliance on
cliché. The formulaic style has its charms for me both in Homer and on the
nightly news. Nor am I
disposed to be unduly harsh on them for the partisanship which makes them so
much more eager
to retail Democratic clichés than Republican ones. “Party” and
“partisan” are
not dirty words in
my book. But I confess it is exasperating when journalists allow their vanity
to be flattered by
partisan cliché-mongers into thinking that, like the sedulous spinners but
unlike their partisan
opponents, they themselves are not partisans.
James Carville seems to have been the
first, though