Media O.D.

On television, the institution of the pre-interview is very much apropos here. It just happened to me on the Canadian equivalent of the "Today Show." Whether you've already been declared a guest or whether you're simply being scouted as a possible guest, a producer will call you and conduct a pre-interview which can last up to a half hour. They're probing for your views. One motive is to prepare the host. In general, they're looking for balance and, on hard-hitting shows, for polarization. I wouldn't call this censorship exactly; it's a matter of smoothing the operation. But it has the effect of making you easily cast, whoever you are.

The media does sometimes get called on its mistakes, though.

I took a whole discussion out of the book about authenticity scandals and how various media police themselves. When they're charged with violating canons of truth, they get very nervous and then will punish someone or publicly declare that they won't do it anymore. Whether it's moving the pyramids closer together to fit on the cover of National Geographic in the late '80s or sticking Oprah's face on Ann-Margret's body in TV Guide. ABC started a binge with simulations on the news. There was a lot of anxiety and anger about that.

Most recently the New York Times Magazine ate crow when it proclaimed at great length in an editor's note that they had run a piece by Michael Finkel which involved composites [fictional individuals described in a story who are a combination of the traits and experiences of several actual people]. That was a big message -- composites violate rules of transparency. Periodically, there are these little scandals that suggest that it's very important for news organizations to declare that they're on the up and up. Fox has been through this with Geraldo. In a way, the fact that these scandals exist is a tribute to the depth of the expectation that most people have that what they're seeing is true.

What about things that aren't quite scandals, but still mistakes, like the New York Times and Whitewater? Is it their responsibility to acknowledge their complicity in pushing that investigation along for so many years, or were they doing their job at the time? Now that the Ray Report is out, and the Clintons have been pronounced innocent, should the Times have dealt with their part in all this?

Absolutely. Their part was immense, in both Whitewater and Lewinsky.

What could they have done?

They should have 'fessed up. [New York Times Editorial Page Editor] Gail Collins should have taken the chance to step away from the shadow of [New York Times Executive Editor] Howell Raines, but I guess those politics are delicate. Or maybe she agrees with him. The insistence of the editorial page in particular, the crusade, the obsession with the hunt, the animus against the Clintons, is a scandal. It was a political force in the 1990s, and it would be honorable to face up to it. I did see the Wall Street Journal the other day. They're very creative. On their editorial page, one point they made was that Nixon was rightly embarrassed by his misdeeds and kept the tapes, whereas the Clintons never came clean. Nixon is their moral exemplar.

Do you believe the New York Times is still America's best newspaper?

The Times is our best newspaper, and it's a better newspaper than ever before, but it has this squeamishness about criticism. One of the improvements of the Times is that the news of the week has become more than a book report, more than a roundup. It's actually written by reporters with voices. There must be some growing autonomy there.

What about the Washington Post?

In yesterday's Washington Post there's an amazing, fiery letter from James Carville. It's quite remarkable, to the Post's credit, that they ran it because Carville basically says that the Post is still not owning up to the fact that they loved Ken Starr because of what he did for them in the Tavoulareas case. William Tavoulareas was the head of Mobil, and the Post did an exposi on him in the '70s -- it had to do with corruption, nepotism, favors to his son. Tavoulareas sued and won at the local level, won at the federal district level, and then the decision was overturned at the court of appeals level in a decision written by Ken Starr.

I learned about this, by the way, from Michael Schudson, who wrote a book about how Watergate was covered. He had told me the story of how he interviewed Bob Woodward in the late '70s, early '80s, about Watergate and Woodward said, "Yeah, Watergate was important, but more important in giving the press its head was this decision." And Woodward ran upstairs and came back with a copy of the decision written by Ken Starr. This was the breaking of the chains on journalism. So many people thought that among the factors that made the Post rather gushy about Ken Starr was the fact that he had done them a great favor, though I don't think that's the whole of it. But anyway, Carville says this and the Post ran it. It's remarkable.

Your book seems to take on the bigger questions about the state of media. What were you trying to figure out?

I had an itch of dissatisfaction with what I had done, and what others had done, which aimed to strip away some feature of media and get a grip on it -- whether that's news trends or Internet utopias or entertainment trends. When I sat down and looked at what I had written, I still felt like I hadn't gotten to the hollow core of the beast.

Years ago, while I was working on "Inside Prime Time," a book about the television industry, I was collecting a file of notes which I sort of goofily called Ontology. And what I meant was: "What does it mean that there's this screen that you're living on?" I was scribbling notes about things like the size of a screen and the brightness of the screen. These things have been gnawing at me for a long time.

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