Without wishing to add yet another level of incestuous complexity
to the subject, I cannot but notice the following lead to a story
by Howard Kurtz for The Washington Post on-line: “The
Bush-bashing may have faded for the moment, but Vice President
Gore won the media skirmishing this morning by figuring out once
again how to make news.” Kurtz professes to think that Gore’s
victory was the result of an interview he gave to The New York
Times about sex and violence in entertainment. This had news
value because the vice president had hitherto been thought
reluctant to criticize the entertainment industry, whose
political contributions tend to go to Democrats. It was also
timed to coincide with an FTC report on the “pervasive and
aggressive marketing of violent movies, music, and electronic
games” to those whom the industry itself considers too young for
them.

In other words, the media report on Mr. Gore’s success at
manipulating the media as if their discovery of that manipulation
were the media’s own, complementary success and somehow
completely unrelated to the manipulation itself. That way, I
guess, everybody’s happy and has something to show for his
participation in the process. It is a pattern familiar from the
great tabloid stories of the 1990s—Tonya Harding, O.J., Monica
Lewinsky—in the reporting of which the media culture’s frequent
displays of self-criticism for its own prurience,
obtrusiveness, or bad taste became part of the show, a
demonstration that reporters had been prurient, been obtrusive, or
shown