ABSTRACT
The roles of the news media as intermediaries between an event and its presentation, as well as the constitutive role of these media in shaping the events themselves. Just as presidential politics increasingly reflects the logic of media work and thereby becomes but an extension of media programming, so too does the public treatment of daily governmental affairs. The thousands of pages of news reports and Senate Committee on Governmental Affairs transcripts about the Lance hearings make this issue a prime candidate with which to investigate and illustrate the logic of news work and show its impact on modern political life. The “national politics” referred to are the issues and strategies preferred by the major news media. The news media, in effect, insisted that their standards of proper conduct and fair play be observed, even if their criteria were far removed from the workings of the day-to-day world.
