Former congressional staffer Tim Russert, elevated to host of NBC's Meet the Press , invited internet gossip columnist Matt Drudge to be a commentator on the scandal on his January 25 show. It was a classic case of libel that should have ended Drudge's career on the spot, but Russert greeted him as an equal to the New York Times 's William Safire and asked him for information about the Lewinsky scandal, as if Drudge had conducted his own investigation of the principals. The press should not have inserted itself into the story in a way that would make it even more difficult for a president to perform his regular duties as head of state and chief executive. Clinton, of course, didn't answer, so Blitzer didn't elicit any new information about Clinton and Lewinsky. What he did was enhance his own reputation as a media heavy and cast a pall over an occasion meant to address U.S. and British policy toward Iraq.
T here are multiple reasons why the press behaved so shamelessly.
With the advent of cable and the Internet, networks, news magazines, and many newspapers have gone to war over markets. Sometimes, this led to publishers' agreeing to suppress information about foreign or domestic policy that the public needed to know, but other times it led to commendable caution about creating crises where none need have existed. The Washington Post 's finest moment, of course, was when publisher Katharine Graham made an anguished decision that the dimensions of the Watergate scandal warranted the paper's closest attention even if, as a result, the presidency was imperiled. Most of today's publishers will never face this kind of conflict because they no longer conceive of themselves as guardians of the republic. A case in point is the current leadership of the Washington Post and Newsweek .