No Cigar
No
Cigar
You already know what that
headline refers to, don't you? But how do you know?
In
"Readme" recently
we told of how a British newspaper tried to evade Britain's absurd Official
Secrets Act by inviting
Slate
to publish an article by a former
spy making spectacular charges against the British intelligence services. The
idea was that once an American online publication--accessible in Britain--had
told the tale, the British press could report that we had reported it. We
ultimately declined this opportunity, reasoning that we could not honestly
maintain that publication in Britain was merely "incidental," since the instant
worldwide accessibility of
Slate
was, in fact, the whole point.
The story was picked up, though, by a more provincial publication--the New
York Times --which could more credibly make that claim. And thus the British
papers were free to tell the tale.
In the past week or so, oddly, the same process has
happened in reverse. A story that almost no American publication will report
directly has been widely reported anyhow, sort of, in part in the form of
reporting that the story has been reported in England. The story involves
President Clinton, Monica Lewinsky, and a cigar, and allegedly is part of the
special prosecutor's as-yet-unwritten report to Congress. The current status of
this story is extremely peculiar. It has been Topic A in Washington. There have
been jokes about it on Jay Leno and passing comments on the TV yack shows. The
Drudge Report and the New York Post have told it in some detail.
The British and other foreign presses have also reported it--on the Web as well
as on paper. Not a word, though, in the "newspaper of record," the
Times . And the Washington Post buried a coy discussion of the British coverage in the back half of
a barely related article about columnists turning against Clinton.
(
Slate
has been full of unilluminating references, in "The Breakfast Table," "Chatterbox," "Diary," and BT again.)
There is a real problem here,
which the Internet obviously makes much worse. The Washington Post once
got widely mocked for an editorial justifying the publication of a damaging
rumor about a public official with the argument that while the rumor may not be
true, it is true there is a rumor. But actually, there's something to that
argument. On the one hand, a publication's standards of proof and taste should
not be hostage to the lesser standards of other publications. On the other
hand, a story can spread without the help of the establishment media to the
point where making no acknowledgment of its existence becomes a failure in your
basic duty to reflect reality.
What does
seem unsatisfactory is the current netherworld where serious publications refer
to the story as if everyone knows it without ever telling it straight. Burying
the story as a way of sort of half-publishing it--the Washington Post
approach--also seems silly. So if you don't know what the heck all this is
about the cigar, see "Explainer." Of course, we're not saying it's true. We're just
saying it's true that it's a rumor.
Lonely
and Depressed and Proud of It
The lumber-byproduct media
have reported with glee a study out of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh purporting
to show that spending time on the Internet tends to make people more lonely and
depressed. This contradicts the widespread view among cyberfolk (including,
apparently, the study's own disappointed authors) that people staring into
computer screens form a wonderful new type of electronic community. The authors
claim to have corrected for the possibility that lonely, depressed people are
more inclined to use the Internet to begin with, and a cyberwag quoted in
USA Today has already made the requisite joke that maybe these people
are depressed by being in Pittsburgh.
(The study is 25 pages long.
To minimize the risk of loneliness and depression, read this nine
page press release.)
So how can we Internet
apologists explain away this finding? Well, try this. Perhaps Internet users
are more depressed because they are better informed. Perhaps their feelings of
increased loneliness are reflections of a deepened understanding of the human
condition. Let's face it: The world is a mess, life is basically futile, and
other people are pretty dreadful and don't like you much anyhow. And you'd
never acquire all this superior insight if you didn't spend many, many hours on
the Internet. So read
Slate
. A lot. And don't forget to
floss.
--Michael Kinsley
