THE SAVAGE STRUGGLE FOR POWER / SPECIAL REPORT: CAMPAIGN ’92 : When Establishment Press Meets Tabloid, No One Emerges Clean : Media: The renegade press has been steadily testing the envelope of what is news. Now the legitimate press appears increasingly co-opted.

To the quadrennial presidential rituals of stomping through the snowy winters of New Hampshire and bussing babies, we must now add a new ritual: charges of a candidate’s marital infidelity and the press’ hand-wringing over how to handle them.

On Thursday, when the Star, a supermarket tabloid, alleged that Democratic presidential front-runner Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton had had a 12-year affair with a sometime singer, only NBC of the network news organizations reported it. The New York Times pointedly consigned the story to the Siberia of a small box on page A-14 and The Times put it on A-20. But the Washington Post placed Clinton’s denial on Page 1. On “Nightline,” which was devoted to the Clinton scandal that evening, Ted Koppel danced around the issue. If Clinton felt obligated to address the allegations, argued Koppel, why should “Nightline” demur? To which one of Koppel’s guests answered: “I really think major news organizations should not be taking the lead from a sleazy supermarket tabloid.”

This indeed framed the debate. Putting aside both ethical and journalistic questions about the relevance of a candidate’s indiscretions, the Clinton squall represents a fundamental change in the relationship between the disreputable renegade press of tabloids and scandal sheets and the so-called Establishment press. At least revelations about Gary Hart’s indiscretions had come from first-hand reporting by a legitimate journalist working for a real newspaper. But the Clinton brouhaha emanated from the Star, where aliens and Elvis sightings prevail. Could the Star really sink a candidacy?

Even a decade ago, the question would have been unthinkable, because allegations of this sort would have remained sequestered at the checkout counter. Way back in the 1920s, when the first tabloids hit the stands, the Establishment press, those bulwarks against moral and journalistic degeneracy, gladly ceded sensationalism to the new papers and then moralized about it. “They appeal to a mentality below the average,” wrote one critic of the tabloids. The Establishment press would no more have trafficked in the information of the renegade press than it would have put girlie pictures on its front pages. The differences were a point of honor.

But they were also a matter of cosmology. The Establishment press was dedicated to the proposition that the world was as ordered as the columns on its pages, that information dispassionately reported contributed to rational discourse. Tabloids of the ‘20s, like the supermarket sheets of today, purveyed a complete vision, too--only their world was chaotic and lurid. Their obligations were less to some higher truth, as espoused by the Establishment press, than to a sort of “lower” truth, which almost parodied Establishment concerns. “Distort the world, until its news is all murder, divorce, crime, passion and chicanery,” snarled one critic of the tabloid recipe in 1927. “In place of the full life, or the good life, or the hard life of experience, fill the mind with a phantasmagoria where easy wealth, sordid luxury, scandal, degeneracy and drunken folly swirl through the pages in an intoxicating vulgarity.” The recipe hasn’t changed much since.

What has changed, however, is the edge of the sensationalist envelope. Predicated on revealing secrets, the renegade press was always expanding its boundaries. When Joseph Medill Patterson launched the New York Daily News, America’s first tabloid, in 1919, he explicitly proscribed any story that wasn’t a matter of public record--which meant infidelities had to reach the divorce court before they would be reported. Walter Winchell and other gossips revised that rule by trading in misbehavior that hadn’t yet hit the courts. By the 1950s, with Confidential magazine and its imitators, all hell had broken loose. Until it was put out of business by legal harassment, Confidential specialized, as Time once put it, in “finding one black mark in a subject’s distant past, and hammering him with it.”

No one was ever going to confuse Confidential with a respectable publication, but, in truth, the tabloids, scandal sheets and supermarket sheets were not only operating on the journalistic margins--they were, to use an analogy familiar to computer users, gradually changing the default settings of the media. By continually establishing new terms for what was permissible, these renegades are forcing the Establishment press to recalibrate its terms of permissibility.

As much as anything, this recalibration--which brings the Star to the pages of the Washington Post--is a function of our own changing expectations of the press. Because the renegade press has been inundating us with celebrities’ intimacies for years, we expect them now--everywhere. We expect to know who has drug problems or who is abusing his wife. We expect this as an entitlement, part of the general fund of knowledge, and we expect our media to oblige us or not, at their peril. After all, what would you rather read about, Clinton’s economic policies or his alleged infidelities?

At the same time, less apparent but no less important, the renegade press has been elevating the story function of the news over the information function. These two functions have always coexisted--the need to tell a story and the need to provide information--but the renegade press long ago tipped the balance for the former. When news is seen as a commodity rather than a responsibility--how the renegade press always saw it--then the melodramatic and titillating will triumph over the sober, the reasoned and the instructive. The news becomes a form of entertainment, and the media search for new plot twists for their ongoing show. Hence Clinton and his alleged affair.

Presumably, the Establishment media could have resisted, but like a weary boxer in the last round, their heart just doesn’t seem to be in it. They know we have been conditioned to expect a show, and they know they must provide one or be co-opted by the renegades and TV. As Daniel Boorstin once wrote, “There was a time when a reader of an unexciting newspaper would remark, ‘How dull is the world today!’ Nowadays he says, ‘What a dull newspaper!’ ”

In its defense, the Establishment press claim that, in covering the Clinton affair, they are merely reporting the reporting of the news, not making it. But this is more a capitulation to the Star than an excuse, a ploy to smuggle the goodies into the paper without taking responsibility for doing so. The Clinton story only becomes a story when the Establishment press carry it.

Still, one has to feel sympathy for the journalistic Old Guard now that the wall between it and the renegades has fallen and the most august newspapers increasingly resemble the papers once detested. The truth is that once the Establishment press recalibrated their compasses, they began to lose their way. They can talk of “thresholds” of facts and larger “contexts” in agonizing over the Clinton story. But for all these protestations and contortions, the fact remains that the Star has now joined the Establishment or the Establishment has joined it. God help us.