Does the media feeding frenzy over President Clinton's alleged sexual and truthtelling problems feel somehow familiar?
On dozens of occasions in the past four decades, the news media have gone after a wounded politician like sharks. The wounds may be self-inflicted, and the politicians may richly deserve their fates, but it is the journalists who take center stage, creating the news as much as reporting it, altering both the layout of the political landscape and the contours of our government.
In "Feeding Frenzy: How Attack Journalism Has Transformed American Politics" (Free Press, 1991 and 1993), political analyst and University of Virginia government professor Larry J. Sabato provided a case-by-case account of some notable frenzies in the last half-century (summaries of frenzies from the 1996 presidential campaign were written exclusively for washingtonpost.com).
For more pictures of the current feeding frenzy, see our