Tuesday, September 15 -- NEW YORK -- We nearly choked on our coffee this morning as we read Howard Kurtz's latest commentary in The Washington Post. Kurtz, author of Spin Cycle, a look at the Clinton public relations team, has also been showing up frequently on CNN.

Kurtz, much to our surprise, seems to be making the same point that Dave Gibbons did last week, but from the opposite side of the fence -- the media find themselves playing to an audiense that largely does not seem to be listening, and are shocked, simply shocked, to realize they are having no effect.

Needless to say, we were amused. So we decided to run Howard's entire editorial here today -- with our own "spin"-terpretation in italics.

Enjoy!

-- The Editors

by Howard Kurtz

For months now, many media commentators have been saying, in private and on television chat shows, that the public would come to share their outrage about President Clinton soon enough. Once ordinary Americans learned the seamy details of Clinton's conduct, once the independent counsel's findings became public, the president's poll ratings would surely plummet.

We're screwed. For months, we members of the media elite have been leaking the most sleazy and salacious testimony about President Clinton in a grab at the Woodward-Bernstein brass ring of "investigative" glory, hoping that the dirt would be enough to turn the nation against Clinton and we could take the credit. We do what our publishers and owners tell us -- we have to get Clinton out before he stops the Social Security privatization which will, of course, drive our stock sky high as too much money chases too little value.

Yet four days after the release of Kenneth W. Starr's sexually explicit report, there has been no such public explosion. Sizable majorities still tell pollsters they approve of the president's job performance and oppose impeachment or resignation.

But the bonehead public just isn't listening to us -- even after the right wing controlled Congress decided to dump Starr’s pornographic summary report onto the Internet and into the major daily newspapers. Damn you people for not buying into our bill of goods!

The contrast with the media's collective sense of betrayal has never been starker. USA Today yesterday joined such newspapers as the Philadelphia Inquirer, Des Moines Register, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, San Jose Mercury News and Detroit Free Press in urging Clinton to resign over the Monica S. Lewinsky affair. The weekend talk shows were filled with indignant questions and harsh commentary, as were the newsmagazines that came out yesterday.

The public just isn't playing along with our game plan -- despite calls from the right's friends at editorial desks for him to get out of Dodge, and calculated collusion between "neutral" big network journalists like Russert, Brokaw, Donaldson and "itty bitty worthless commentators" like Stuart "Odie Colognie" Taylor and Bill "Divorced Moral Ayatollah" Bennett.

All this underscores what David Corn, Washington editor of the liberal Nation magazine, calls "the umbrage gap."

Invoking the name of a super-progressive like Corn does no good -- even when we omit the fact that he thinks Clinton is way too conservative. Don't want to tip our hand!

The Lewinsky saga is, after all, hard to escape. Americans are bombarded daily with what news executives regard as a story of grave consequence -- on the front pages, on the nightly news, on talk radio, on the Internet.

This leaves many journalists, who gauge public opinion for a living, puzzled that so many people can give Clinton such low marks for honesty and integrity and yet approve of his performance as president.

I'm telling you, I've never been this frustrated in my life. I mean, the public are supposed to be our damn sheep, swallowing everything we throw their way. They just refuse to believe what we're telling them -- that Clinton MUST go. Where did we go wrong? I've done my part in saturating the media with Lewinskiana to help with the "takedown" -- and Clinton's job approval is STILL in the HIGH 60s! And I'm appalled that the Starr dump did little to affect any of Clinton's poll numbers.

"The greatest surprise in this whole story is the ongoing gap between the elite -- who now almost uniformly despise Clinton -- and the people, who have stuck with him so far," writes Newsweek columnist Jonathan Alter.

Hmmm... maybe there's no escaping that John Q. Sixpack likes what Clinton is doing for them, and has caught on to the GOP "big tax cut" scam-- where their tax bill drops a whopping fifty bucks a year while multinationals get millions in givebacks, don't give a flying toss about his private life, and might be a little pissed at us for putting a 24-hour R-rated spew on the tube for the kids to see. Maybe Clinton ought to ask “media gurus” the same questions they ask him -- after all a President can serve only 8 years. People like Russert seem to have been on the air -- forever.

In Corn's view, the story feels personal for the Washington press corps.

"There's a yuppie revenge attitude going on here," Corn said. "We in the media class know Bill Clinton or people who work for Bill Clinton; he's in the same college dorm as we are. He's the guy raising his hand in the front of the classroom, always getting away with stuff. But the public looks at politicians and says, 'We care about whether you care about us. We're the story, not you.' "

...and John and Jane Q. College-Alum has been down the "party hearty" road with Clinton -- they admire him doing good for the nation and are willing to look the other way if he's engaged in a little bad behavior. Heck, even I can't argue that everyone likes a "stick man."

Cokie Roberts, co-host of ABC's "This Week" and the daughter of two members of Congress, described the journalistic view of public officials this way: "We admire them more. We hold politicians in higher regard than the public does and therefore we expect more of them. The notion that 'they're all like that' offends us....

"I'm sure that for some [media] people there's a sense that we're going to prove ourselves to be right, the people who said early on that he'd never live through this. I have more of a sense of sadness."

Our best consummate insiders like Cokie, whose dear mother plotted the demise of Jesse Jackson, are completely unable to sway public opinion about moral imperative. And she's both “connected” and almost smart. But most people just don't buy the "moral authority" spin.

In recent days, many media commentators have expressed disgust both with Clinton's behavior and his insistence that he did not commit perjury when he denied under oath having had "sexual relations" with Lewinsky.

Fox's Brit Hume: "If this were in a court of law and he tried to make a distinction like that... there'd be a 10-minute recess while they got the jury's laughter to stop. This is absurd."

We've been going non-stop since Starr delivered the "goods" that were supposed to do Clinton. We've been spinning the "perjury" evidence and allegations as fact and not even THAT works. Maybe those SOBs at American Politics Journal are right -- the Jones attorneys would be on the receiving end of the jury laugh track. And who the heck is Brit Hume anyway -- certainly no example of a "moral family man" as described by his pal Jerry Falwell, who would tell Brit his son was burning in Hell.

Time's Margaret Carlson: "What I'm struck by in reading the report is it took $40 million to nail this piece of human Jell-O to the wall. He can't slither away from what he did because of this report."

At least the more "liberal" voices at Time are lining up with Isikoff and me... as if it will do any good...

Wall Street Journal columnist Al Hunt: "It is sleazy. It is kinky. It is repulsive and I couldn't wait to turn the page."

Now there's an idea! Maybe if we could get Scaife to produce a TV movie... Bruce Boxleitner as Clinton... Shannon Doherty as Monica... Cathy Bates as Hillary... Heck, it wouldn't set his foundations back more than a quarter million tops and it would draw better ratings than the Super Bowl!

Interviewers questioning the president's lawyers Sunday struck a tone of disbelief. After White House counsel Charles F.C. Ruff insisted on "Meet the Press" that Clinton had not committed perjury, host Tim Russert said: "Now, are the American people supposed to believe that?"

Now this really galls me -- everyone is supposed to hate lawyers -- but not even a parade of them will stop the public from believing that Clinton was trying to cover up the affair! Maybe it’s the wheelchair? But then again, Krauthammer is a putz.

On This Week, ABC's George Will asked presidential attorney David E. Kendall: "Are you a normal person?... The president says he did not have sexual relations as normal people understand the term. Did he not have sexual relations as you understand the term?"

Maybe it's that they'd try to hide the truth under oath so as not to hurt their families AND their lovers -- and resent a smug, high-handed elitist hypocrite like George Will who had what I guess I might characterize as a “less than forthright” marriage telling them what "normal" should be. If George Will is normal then so was Henirich Himmler.

Fueled by this sort of skepticism, the Lewinsky story has become a driving force in the media culture, providing fodder for the nightly cable shows, cover stories for the newsmagazines, pictures for Vanity Fair, front-page exposes for the newspapers. This week's New Yorker has a cost-benefit piece on "Monicanomics," while the political Hotline carries regular dispatches on "Moniculture."

We've been trying our level best to make this into a scandal, and instead it's turned into a popular culture phenomenon at our expense! The public doesn't buy it, and we're starting to look like fools!

"We're psychologically invested in this story because journalists emotionally don't like liars," said Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism. "We think of ourselves as being truth-seekers."

We bought into this story thinking that we could use our "moral authority" as guardians of the First Amendment to tell people what to think. We're the truth-makers, but the public won't listen!

At the same time, he said, "the mass media needs a huge audience to sustain itself, the networks in particular. They need a blockbuster, a crossover hit... MSNBC has sustained itself, first on Diana, then on Monica ."

We've tried to turn this into a moneymaking bonanza for our parent companies. People are tuning in the prurience but tuning out our message! Well, maybe Jon-Benet will rise from her tiny grave.

But this relentless, full-speed-ahead coverage has also produced a backlash against the media. Indeed, some readers and viewers have suggested that perhaps journalists' sex lives should be scrutinized with equal fervor.

We're hoist on our own petards now. Already details of George Will's messy ejection from his own home by his first wife have hit the Internet, and it's only a matter of days before some loose cannon like Carville starts airing our dirty laundry.... Brit.

Texas columnist Molly Ivins, writing in Time, scolded the press: "You shoved his sex life in our faces last January, and rubbed our noses in it for eight months more, so by now we're more disgusted with you than with Bill Clinton."

And it doubly galls me that we should have listened to that whining liberal Molly Ivins back in January. Maybe if our material had been as funny as her columns can be... damn!

This cultural divide is not new. Large majorities of Americans believed that the media went overboard on the Whitewater investigation and the 1996 campaign fund-raising probe, both of which received huge amounts of attention until Lewinsky came along. Reporters who have covered Clinton since the Gennifer Flowers flap of 1992 -- and during seven months of misleading answers on Lewinsky -- have long wondered why the president's bobbing and weaving does little to damage his public standing.

And we should have taken a hint when Whitewater didn't resonate with the public but got played up on hate radio instead. Maybe they could tell there was no there there, and that Gennifer Flowers was a woman scorned seeking public revenge and maybe her fifteen seconds of fame -- after that Stuttering John from the Howard Stern Show asked her if she was planning to sleep with any other candidates in '92. There went her credibility!

The scandal has transcended the media's ideological boundaries. Liberal columnists such as Clarence Page of the Chicago Tribune and Lars-Erik Nelson of the New York Daily News have joined those urging Clinton to quit. USA Today's defection is a particular setback for the White House, which has long regarded the Gannett paper as more of a bellwether and less scandal-obsessed than its national rivals. Even the president's few defenders in the media say he is a liar and a lout but shouldn't be run out of office.

But look at the bright side -- the Starr dump did enough damage that a few Clintonistas have called for him to step down (the ones in trouble or running for President themselves) -- but not enough of them for my taste.

Clinton's resilience has been especially frustrating for conservative journalists. "I'm perfectly willing to say there are times the people are wrong, or at least haven't yet come to what I regard as the correct view," said William Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard.

But my GOP pals remain bitter -- Kristol's frustrated that the public won't buy our bill of goods. What would Kristol know about "The People" anyway. They merely shine his shoes.

"It's important that people in the media who are convinced they are absolutely right stop and think whether there's a lesson to be learned from public opinion," he said. "It should be difficult to convince people to be for impeachment."

Maybe we should get back to reporting real news, because our impeachment frenzy is sure to come back and bite us in the butt. Or better yet... Yeah... Let’s start defending Clinton -- our ratings will SOAR!!!!!!