Back in Washington, Douglas Ginsburg's nomination to the Supreme Court was disappearing in clouds of remembered marijuana smoke. Out in Des Moines, Democratic presidential candidates were gathering for yet another collective appearance prior to the Iowa caucuses. The drill on that chilly November day in 1987 called for a series of solo press conferences before the main event. The tenor of these showed us at our worst.

The trade deficit? Arms control? Reaganomics? Forget about it. The questioners who dominated the interrogation of serious men contending for the presidency fixed on one subject: whether the politicians, a la the hapless Ginsburg, had ever inhaled pot and if so, when, why, etc. I recall being unable to decide whether the feeling of suffocation that drove me from the cramped briefing room resulted from overcrowding or from a sense of being throttled by terminal triviality.

That spasm of pack journalism, mercifully, lasted only a few days and had no significant impact on the campaign. But its very pettiness earns the Ginsburg debacle's spin-off a place on Larry Sabato's hit parade of three-dozen press sensations. Sabato's roster ranges from trivial cases like the Ginsburg affair to historic events including the Watergate and Iran-contra scandals.

The common thread connecting most of the incidents is excess; too much zeal and too many echoes, in Sabato's view, too often produce unfair distortions even when the nub of the story is true. As the title implies, Sabato concludes that the media's obsession with the negative still further debases our already tinny political process.

Sabato, a political scientist at the University of Virginia, is frequently quoted by reporters because of his savvy and his agility with one-liners. Both strengths show up in his book. Deftly and succinctly, he reviews the press corps' "evolution from lapdog to watchdog to junkyard dog in the years since Franklin Roosevelt's presidency." He argues that society in general and the news business in particular would be far better off if the transformation had stopped at the second canine stage.

It's difficult to quarrel with that, or with most of the author's observations on the reasons why coverage has become more harsh and personal. One of the more interesting causes -- and one often overlooked -- is the dissolution of yesteryear's tacit male bonding between the men on the stump and the boys on the bus. The gender revolution, among other changes, ended the conspiracy of silence about male hanky-panky. (Geraldine Ferraro, however, can testify that the advent of women reporters hardly made life easy for women candidates.)

But Sabato's critique falters in other respects. The more important cases he reviews, including Watergate and the Iran-contra mess, clearly hinged on events that cried out for disclosure, as the author readily concedes. If anything, the press was slow on the shovel in digging into those stories. In cases of more personal exposes, such as Gary Hart's problems and Jesse Jackson's remarks about "Hymietown," the facts surely had political relevance. Sabato grants that as well, while quibbling about details. Where Hart is concerned, he says, the press's original suspicions were "almost certainly correct, but the standard of probable cause was a dubious one. . . ." The question of probable cause figures in the issuance of bench warrants, not in reportorial ventures.

Sabato makes his charge of mindless excess stick in other instances, to be sure. Jack Kemp got a thoroughly rawdeal when writers and TV interviewers insisted on reviving, ad nauseum, ancient and baseless gossip about his sexual orientation. Michael Dukakis also suffered unfairly in the heavy coverage of a psychiatric problem that did not exist.

But one core factor, which Sabato treats only glancingly, is the changing nature of politics both during campaigns and between them. The collapse of party organization and discipline has personalized the combat to the point of cannibalism. Much of the coverage too readily reflects and magnifies that feral spirit.

This unhappy fact demands more self-scrutiny than the press at large practices. The main value of Sabato's book, given the author's serious intent and absence of malice towards journalism, is that it can stimulate some needed introspection.

Sabato titles his last chapter "Remedies." In it he urges civility, restraint, and a variety of criteria to be applied in deciding whether to publish negative material. Then, having interviewed nearly 200 journalists for this book, he concludes: "When all is said and done on this subject, it is a good bet that more will be said than done."

One indication that he is correct about that turned up while I was reading Feeding Frenzy. The frenzy of that moment was the brouhaha between Virginia Governor Douglas Wilder and Senator Charles Robb, a soap opera involving phone tapping, secret tape recordings, mutual back stabbing, and other all-too-familiar phenomena.

In that episode, the most widely quoted expert was none other than Larry Sabato, who talked knowingly about the significant, perhaps even terminal, damage that both principals were doing to their presidential prospects. His diagnosis may well turn out over time to be true. Meanwhile, his dour pronouncements lent considerable weight to an otherwise frothy story -- thereby encouraging more time on the air and more inches in print. The food chain of feeding frenzies can work in wondrous ways.

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