Covering governing.

To journalists there could have been little surprise in the announcement that former Vice President Gore was to teach a class in journalism at Columbia. Not only did he have some experience as a hack on the Nashville Tennessean before beginning his stellar political career, but politics and journalism are increasingly intertwined, to the point where they are becoming indistinguishable from one another. I don't mean just that we are beginning to see journalists becoming politicians (like Pat Buchanan) and politicians--or at least political handlers like George Stephanopolous or Mary Matalin--becoming journalists. This kind of thing will undoubtedly become more familiar, as we can tell from the case of Miss Matalin, whose return from television to the new Bush administration portends more going back and forth between governing and covering government.

But the distinction between journalists and politicians, at least at the top of their respective professions (if I may misuse the term in the usual way) is blurring in another way as both become sub-types--the "reality" version, if you will--of the modern media star. Perhaps the pattern for our future leaders will lie somewhere between Miss Matalin, whose charming double-act with her husband, the Democratic consultant James Carville, was beginning to look old, and Governor Jesse Ventura of Minnesota. The latter has gone from television wrestler to talk-show host to governor to, most recently (and while still serving as governor), chief announcer for the World Wrestling Federation's Extreme Football League (or XFL), which started broadcasting on Saturday nights on NBC just as the former vice president took up his new lectureship.

Well, a man's got to do what he knows best, I suppose, though it's not everyone who can do it with the media looking admiringly on. Football, wrestling, even political consulting have their devoted followers, but professing journalism? And then there was the title of Gore's course: "Covering National Affairs in the Information Age." One supposes that, to give him the benefit of the doubt, he knows something about conducting national affairs--at least it is ostensibly what he has been doing for the past twenty years--but what has that to do with covering them? Even in his days back on the Tennessean he wasn't doing that. And the bit about "the Information Age" is a transparent attempt to appear "relevant" which can only reinforce the reputation for bumptiousness of the man who once claimed that he "took the initiative in creating the Internet."

But I am being disingenuous. Just as politicians and journalists are becoming indistinguishable, so are covering national affairs and conducting them. That is the lesson of "the permanent campaign" as perfected by the Clinton presidency, which has turned governing into nine-tenths public relations--in essence the politicians "covering" themselves--and only one-tenth what Clinton liked humorously to refer to as "the people's business." At the same time, those whose business was once supposed to be reporting have grown more and more puffed up with the sense of their own importance as a quasi-Constitutional branch of government. And, indeed, to most people the actual opposition to our Constitutionally appointed officers of state, including those of both parties in Congress, is led by Ted Koppel, Tim Russert, and Sam 'n' Cokie.

The vanishing distinction between politician and journalist was made apparent when Al Gore announced to much puzzlement but with the abject acquiescence of Columbia that his lectures were to be "off the record"--which is what politicians say to prevent journalists from attributing to them views that they in fact hold. For a journalist, or a lecturer in journalism, to claim this privilege suggests hypocrisy, or dishonesty, or self-importance, or some combination of the three. And in fact that's just what Gore displayed when he claimed, to a reporter complaining about the lack of access, "It's the school's policy." Even if that were true, it could only have been a "policy" formulated on his arrival at Columbia--since other lecturers there are not troubled with hordes of reporters clamoring to know what they have said in the classroom. If they were, I very much doubt that a "policy" of clamming up would be sustainable.

In any case, as Tunku Varadarajan reported in The Wall Street Journal, another off-the-record source has revealed that it was Gore himself who made the stipulation--"no gag, no Gore"--as a condition of his coming to Columbia. In his angry letter to the Journal about Mr. Varadarajan's article, Tom Goldstein, the dean of the Columbia J-school, complained vaguely about "bad reporting" but did not directly deny this report. Instead, he wrote, "We have asked the vice president to honor our policies and are glad he has agreed to do so"--which, to a skeptic trained in the school of Clintonian subtlety, by no means precludes the interpretation that the policies were invented by Gore before he was asked, and so graciously agreed, to honor them. The real problem, according to Dean Goldstein, is that naifs like Mr. Varadarajan supposed that "off the record" meant that Gore's students were not supposed to talk to the press about him.

Just fancy that! The very idea! Of course "We had no intention of preventing students from talking to the press afterward," Dean Goldstein now peevishly insists. "If there was any misunderstanding about this, we regret it, and suggest that the term 'off the record' either needs to be better defined or to be discarded." Hear, hear. Henceforth, "off the record" shall be defined as meaning that it's okay to blab your head off about what you have heard--especially if it can advance your career. That at any rate seems to have been the thinking on the subject by the hitherto obscure Mr. Josh Noel, Columbia journalism student, and The New York Times which published his first-hand account of being taught by the former vice president.