agenda she was furtively trying to advance?
Either way, you’ve got a rationale for a journalism that has no regard for personal privacy, as some commentators seem to be demanding with Kagan. The normally lucid Andrew Sullivan, while firmly opposed to “coercive exposure,” a felicitous phrase, offered this puzzling formulation to a Poynter Institute columnist: “I think they [news media] mistake invading someone’s privacy with noting their public identity,” as if one’s most intimate doings constituted a public persona. The columnist, Mallary Jean Tenore, suggested the media have failed to respond to intense public interest, as reflected in the volume of Kagan-related chatter and speculation on the Internet. Fine. Except that if journalists heeded the so-called Fifth Estate, our news would be even more sodden than it is with sex of all kinds, celebrity bustups and fascinating foolishness. The Fourth Estate would indeed be hip and responsive, also thoroughly dysfunctional. To me, the media have done about as much as they should w
