What really grates on people up here on the Hill, myself included, is the sanctimony and hypocrisy of the capital press corps, the way too many reporters fail to hold themselves to the same standards they expect of Congress. I don't say this as a defensive pol. I've spent a lot more time on the other side, as an editor of The Washington Monthly and a staff writer for The Christian Science Monitor. I also worked for five years with Ralph Nader, not avenue that encourages coddling views of Congress or of politicians.

Now, having seen Washington from both sides, I have to tell you: I generally have more respect for the pols. They have a tougher job, carry more responsibility, suffer more abuse, and do all this, for the most pan, with much more grace than reporters. For all the defects of our democracy, they are accountable in ways that few in the media (or corporate business, for that matter) ever will be. I know there are some bad ones. But there are a lot more elected people in Washington trying to do a good job, honorably, than the media would lead you to believe. It pains me to watch these people get gang-tackled and torn to shreds by reporters who can dish it out but can't take it. It pains me just as much to see the cartoon version of Washington and power and of this fragile democracy of ours that emerges.

Reporters say that politicians should meet a "higher standard." I don't buy that. In a mass market democracy, the purity of the media may be even more important than that of our legislators. A George Will or Sam Donaldson or Cokie Roberts reaches a lot more people than your typical member of Congress. They have a lot more say in the public debate. If they are taking money from the very same interest groups that throng the halls of Congress, that corrupts the national debate no less than when members of Congress take the money. At least members of Congress have to disclose such payments. Journalists don't.

Name a perk that Congress gets skewered for, and chances are the media get it too. Free parking at National Airport? Not many reporters I know pay for their own parking. More likely they take an expense-account cab ride and get deposited right at the gate. Speaking of free parking, how about those choice spots that are reserved for reporters, complete with twenty-four-hour security from the capital police?

Junkets? What about the Olympics, the Superbowl, the political conventions, or summit meetings in foreign capitals? It would only take about three reporters, total, to inform the public adequately regarding such events. For presidential vacations in Martha's Vineyard or Colorado, one would do quite well.

I once asked a newspaper editor why he bothered attending the conventions with a bevy of his reporters. Would they really learn anything that the 5,000 or so journalists there weren't already reporting? When I persisted in this line of questioning, he bristled. "Darn it," he said. "I'm going to the conventions."

I certainly don't want to poop on anybody's party. I just don't see why a congressman who visits, say, Geneva, is automatically assumed to be on a junket, while a reporter who spends a week in Geneva is assumed to be on grave reportorial business. (I won't raise the question of frequent flyer miles, since I am confident that all reporters give their miles back to their employers, who paid for them.)

Wining and dining? While major bureaus here wage constant battle against the epicurean tendencies of their reporters, when the company is paying, in my office the typical senatorial lunch is a slice of pizza, or perhaps a bowl of chili. Another senator I know has popcorn and frozen yogurt just about every day.

Accepting "honoraria" from special interest groups? Big-shot Washington reporters have been accepting thousands of dollars from industry groups as honoraria for speeches for years.

Members of Congress and their staffs are subject to an ethics code that is talmudic in its complexity and petty detail. Members cannot accept honoraria or payment for articles. Staff can do so only under very limited conditions. (I'm writing this during an unpaid leave.) It's hard enough to suffer the media when they call Congress crooks. To see them shoveling it in from the very interest groups they accuse Congress of selling out to and then shuck and jive like a politician caught in a funny land deal, really sticks in the craw. When Hillary Rodham Clinton made her hundred thousand in the commodities market, she at least had to put up a thousand of her own. Journo-celebs like Sam Donaldson and George Will can make that much for a few speeches, risk-free, and all they have to put down are a few diet sodas.

Pay and perks are not the only matters on which elected people think journalists need to look in the mirror. Another is the question of spin. Reporters love to catch politicians spinning their way out of binds. Fair enough. But it takes one to know one.

People in public life know that journalists often have the story written, mentally at least, before they start reporting. They know when they're being set up, and they've all had the experience of being milked for quotes to fill in the blanks. When I worked for Ralph Nader, I got a call one day from a Post reporter who was doing a story on the household moving industry, which I had looked into for one of the Nader books. Still fairly new to Washington, and untutored in the game of fetch-a-quote, I thought he was looking for information. I answered his questions with long discussions on the structure of the industry and so forth.

Finally, he broke in. "Look," he said, "would you say that . . .", making the point he wanted me to make.

"Well, I guess you could say that," I said. He promptly ended the call. The next day I discovered that I had said pretty much what he had said.

Something very similar happens to members of Congress and their staffs on stories that get turned against themselves. They end up feeling mugged. I don't know a single reporter who looks forward to being interviewed for someone else's story. They know what the guy at the other end of the line is up to.

Connie Bruck's recent profile of Hillary Rodham Clinton in The New Yorker is a textbook example. It is also almost a clinical case study in the way reporters project onto people in public life the very traits they indulge in themselves. We learn, for example, that Hillary Clinton is a woman with an agenda. Bruck, the reporter, of course has none. We also learn that Clinton has a tendency to use people for her own purposes. Reporters don't use other people? In their working lives that's about all some do, as Janet Malcolm, another New Yorker writer, pointed out a few years ago. They enlist the subject's confidence, pump and cajole them for quotes, and cast them aside or else reward them with favorable mention if they confirm the reporter's thesis. What is Bruck doing with Mrs. Clinton, if not using her to advance her own celebrity journalist persona?

Bruck tells us Mrs. Clinton wouldn't talk with her. She wouldn't talk with the press. In Washington there is no sin more grave. You can be a scoundrel and a knave and get away with it as long as you say nice things about reporters and feed them stories. The question Bruck doesn't ask -- reporters never do -- is whether any sane person in public life would relish talking about themselves to someone like her.

Reporters say they dwell on matters like congressional pay and perks and personal foibles because it is their solemn watchdog duty to do so. That's valid to a point. But there are other things at work too, and one of them is laziness.

Say what you will about government and Congress, they are open for all to see. Every congressional salary, every office expense, appears in a thick volume published twice a year. Digging up dirt here is a little like fishing in a hatchery. You can troll the public record and still have plenty of time to do The McLaughlin Group, free-lance pieces, and speeches to interest groups. By contrast, corporations and other private institutions are much tougher to crack.

The result is a lopsided picture of American life that has major political implications. If Americans heard as much about corruption and waste in the corporate sector, for example, as they do about Congress and government, then our politics might be a lot different. If a congressional salary of $ 138,000 is excessive, what about the reported $ 2.3 million salary of the chief executive of Bristol-Myers Squibb, or the $ 12 million salary of the chairman of Equitable Life Insurance, which is almost enough to pay the salaries of the entire Senate. Those Harry and Louise ads would have a slightly different twist if people knew that insurance company chief executives frequently make over a million dollars a year, and that the industry can take an estimated $ 15,000 from their customers' premiums to pay the likes of George Will to entertain them with a speech.

The intense competition for ad dollars and the fear of libel suits contribute to the press's tendency to focus on Congress and government instead of the private sector. But there's also a more subtle influence, one that is wrapped up in the strange social dynamics of Washington.

After almost two decades here, I perceive among some in the media a sense of superiority to people in public office. Dan Quayle was right on this point, though in a typically narrow and self-pitying fashion. It did annoy the baby-boom reporters that he was first of their generation to arrive at the White House. Quayle saw this in ideological terms, but it was much broader than that, as the fate of Bill Clinton suggests. Reporters today see themselves as generally superior to the people they cover -- smarter, better educated, more discerning. At the same time I occasionally wonder if, deep down, they don't question whether they have what it takes to cut it in the rough and tumble of political life.

So The McLaughlin Group becomes a form of institutional revenge, as do presidential press conferences. The pols are, of course, legitimate targets of criticism, nobody would deny that. But the press seems to forget -- seems eager to forget -- that being a politician calls forth dimensions of character that journalism generally doesn't. Say what you will, these people have to face the voters every two or four or six years. They have to deal with angry constituents, rabid interest groups, reporters, and colleagues that they'd like to stuff in a trunk. They have to deal with a messy world in which the good is often the least bad, and they have to try to solve problems instead of just snickering at the efforts of others.

I'm not suggesting a return to the old see-no-evil days of Washington reporting. The point is not to be nicer to members of Congress. Rather, it's to judge them the way you yourself would want to be judged. It's to get the story -- including the context in which it occurs. Attack-mode journalism has fed an impression that the only problem with Washington is a bunch of bums in office. This leads to a predictable story cycle. A new crop of reps arrives, greeted with fluttery stories about the bold new reformers who are going to change the system. Then, a year later, come the tongue-clucking stories about how the system changed them instead. A year later the process starts all over again. Set them up, knock them down -- and in the process ignore the problems in our political culture of which Congress is just one part.

The so-called House Bank scandal was a perfect example of gang-tackle journalism that misses the point. Few reporters bothered to find out how the system really worked. The fact is, most House members knew about as much about the House Bank as you and I know about ours. The typical "overdraft" was really just a gap of a few days between the bank's receipt of a check for payment and the rep's deposit to cover that check. Most of them didn't even know the lapse was occurring, because the bank never informed them -- just as the rest of us aren't always aware of overdrafts unless our bank informs us. Had they known, they would have adjusted their check-writing schedules, and that would have been the end of it.

A few representatives really did exploit the informality of the system, and those are the ones the media should have nailed. The House leadership, moreover, were the ones running this show. Because reporters didn't ask the obvious question -- what did the typical representative actually know and what was reasonable to expect of him or her -- everyone got tarred with the same brush, and "overdrafts" became a major issue in the 1992 elections. Good thing they weren't debating something frivolous, like health care or NAFTA.

The House Bank also showed how the media conveniently overlook their own role in a story. Few reporters pointed out, for example, that one group besides House members was able to use the bank. This was members of the media, who were able to cash their personal checks. True, they couldn't keep accounts there -- essentially the bank was really just a payroll office. But the check cashing was no small perk. It saved them walking several blocks in the Washington heat and waiting at the ATM machine with the hoi polloi.

Just think what story a Washington reporter could make out of that!

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