Not since Watergate have scandals so dominated the headlines. From Travelgate to Filegate, Paula Jones to Whitewater, they keep coming. Now it's Chinagate, which is helping turn investigative journalism aimed at money in politics into a growth industry. "We are seeing an institutionalization of the money-in-politics beat," says Jack Nelson, the veteran Los Angeles Times Washington correspondent. "Now if you advance a story an inch you can get it on page one. It has a life of its own."
 Never mind that the public isn't paying close attention. According to a Pew Research Center Poll this spring, only 19 percent of Americans were closely following the recent glut of stories documenting campaign-finance excesses, like the selling of the Lincoln bedroom and the flood of questionable Asian money into both political parties' coffers. During the same period, coverage of the Heaven's Gate mass suicide, the Oklahoma City bombing trial, and the Liggett tobacco settlement all trumped Washington campaign-finance stories, though the finance scandals did win more readers than the cloning of sheep and the ups and downs of the stock market.

 And never mind that the stories have not seemed to generate much popular support for campaign finance reform plans. "I don't think it will be a groundswell of public demand that gets reform enacted," says one reform advocate, Thomas Mann, director of governmental studies at the Brookings Institution. "Instead it will be a matter of politicians' anticipating how the public might react if they don't do something." Mann puts the chances of legislative action in this Congress at "less than fifty-fifty."

 Nonetheless, the Washington bureaus of the nation's major newspapers, as well as magazines like Time and broadcasters like CNN, continue to direct more and more resources to covering the money trail. At The Washington Post, Bob Woodward, who with Carl Bernstein broke the Watergate story, is back covering politics and money along with a core group of six investigative reporters, and as many as a dozen at peak periods. The New York Times has seven investigative reporters - three permanent, four on temporary duty - covering various aspects of Washington's money scandals. Both papers also regularly involve White House, congressional, political, and diplomatic correspondents. Also devoting significant reporter power to the money beat are the Los Angeles Times, which broke the story of Korean contributions to the Democratic National Committee, and The Wall Street Journal, the first paper to page-one the Asian-money story.

 Why the seemingly sudden fascination with money in politics? "These stories were just dumped in our laps," says Andy Rosenthal, Washington editor of The New York Times, who will become the paper's foreign editor in September. "We decided that these stories were important and needed a lot of resources to follow multiple threads - the general solicitation of illegal campaign contributions, the Lincoln bedroom, Webb Hubbell and his connection to the Riady family, the story of how campaigns are paid for, the hearings on the Hill, what's happening in the states. It's a very rich field."

 Also driving press attention is the explosive growth in political contributions, especially so-called "soft money" given to the political parties, which is unregulated and particularly open to abuse. During the 1995-1996 presidential election cycle, Democratic party committees took in a record $221.6 million, up 36 percent from the 1991-1992 season, while Republicans raised $416.5 million, a heady 57 percent increase. Says CNN correspondent Brooks Jackson, who's been following the political money trail since the 1970s, when he wrote for The Associated Press: "The story is driven by the sheer volume of money in politics. There's now an arms-race mentality."

 But with so many resources invested in the money story, is there also danger of a journalistic arms race with its own excesses? "We now have a vested interest in scandal," says Andy Glass, Washington bureau chief of the Cox Newspapers. "There are people who earn their livings by investigating Clinton and campaign finance. And there is too much of a tendency to hit home runs, to hype things." The Los Angeles Times's Nelson agrees: "We see recycling all the time: a reporter gets one new nugget of news and it's an excuse to rerun the entire story, right on page one, again. I think we've lowered our journalistic standards."

 CNN's Jackson worries that the press's traditional watchdog function has been confused and overtaken by "partisans who are waging battle by scandal-mongering, trying to accomplish through ethics committees and special prosecutors what they cannot accomplish at the polls." In that environment, he argues, "it's almost impossible for honest and fair-minded journalists to compete with the sensationalism of the politicians."

The Wall Street Journal's Washington bureau chief, Alan Murray, suggests that the answer is not to compete with the hypesters. "I don't think of the money-in-politics beat as a scandal beat," he says. "One thing we do particularly well is to tell people what influences the political process, and money is clearly one factor." But Murray believes that the funneling of foreign money into campaign coffers is a "true scandal," and the Journal has been devoting "more time and effort over the last six months to covering it."

 So with the big guns aiming their top talent at Washington money scandals - as are congressional investigators and special prosecutors - it's a good bet this story won't fade any time soon. When scores of reporters have orders to examine a particular area, they'll find something. "As Lyndon Johnson once said," notes Cox's Glass, "with all this horseshit, there must be a pony somewhere."

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