by Suzanne Garment

About the author: Suzanne Garment, a former Wall Street Journal columnist, is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C.

When you ask a public official what is responsible for today’s surplus of scandal, the odds are that his first answer will be, “The press.’’ And understandably so: Today’s news media play an unprecedented role in our public life, and their power has shaped modern politics. “By the mid-eighties,” writes Richard Clurman, press observer and former chief of correspondents for the Time-Life News Service, “the media had made themselves the cop on every beat.’’ Yet the press did not muscle its way to the top of the current political heap against the opposition of all other...