Students of infotainment were unusually well served by the New York Times yesterday. These days, the best Monday-morning quarterbacking gets done not in the sports section of the “newspaper of record” but in the business section, when the culture and media reporters dissect the political theater of the past week.

Yesterday, reporter Katharine Seelye broached the subject of the relationship between the White House and the press corps. Trying to get a handle on the recent anti-Bush, anti-administration outbursts from the White House briefing room, Seelye delved way back in time to the “Monica-mania” of 1998, when then-White House spokesman Mike McCurry, conceded to allow his daily press briefings to be carried live on TV after (McCurry says) he was told “We [CNN] get 100,000 more households when [we're] on the air.”

[Okay, so McCurry decided to open the door to CNN. Why? Did he think the news for Clinton would be better if 100,000 more people sitting at home were now privy to his misdeeds? But never mind. ---ed.]
Eight years later, Seelye writes:

Ever since ["Monica-mania"], the White House briefings have played out in real time against the daytime dramas, giving the world a glimpse into the daily push-me, pull-you in a democracy of making news (or not) and trying to report it. Now, with cable channels, reality television, talk-back live and blogging on the spot, with viewers and readers hip to stagecraft and expecting to be taken behind the scenes, there seems no turning back.”

Much of what Seelye writes is “meta”: traditionally, it isn’t the role of the media to analyze its own reporting of the “news.”

Seelye’s straying off the reservation is invaluable to the infotainment dissector, however. More on this at a later date.