Not that one wishes to minimize the importance of political bias in the media, but it cannot be said often enough—certainly, I have said it more than once—that there is something even more determinative of the direction to be taken by the media’s political coverage than the well-documented tendency of media-folk to vote Democratic. This is the need to find, particularly in election years, congenial and compelling stories. News coverage of election campaigns eschews the substantive and concentrates on the trivial, as I noted in these pages last month, not only because it is easier and more fun and more attuned to the essentially trivial political interests of the mass audience, but also because it is out of trivialities that the media culture builds the stories on which it is intellectually dependent.

For an illustration of how this narrative-imperative tends to override even strong political biases, take The Hunting of the President, by Joe Conason and Gene Lyons, a most valuable guide to and documentation of the swirl of scandal that followed Bill and Hillary Clinton from Arkansas to Washington in 1993 and subsequently. Conason and Lyons are, it should be said, Clinton partisans of a near Carvillian degree of fervency. Accordingly, their book is marred by their short-sighted insistence on giving the president and the first lady the benefit of every doubt—and there are a great many more doubts than they would have us think. Moreover, since their book went to press, there have been further