Hi. My name is Mike and I'm a newsaholic. Addicted since '72, when I smoked some Watergate. But I was clean and sober for a while. Late summer, early fall.

Why? The scandal. The news was the scandal. Couldn't take it anymore. A colleague here had an opposite reaction. When poor Jim Lehrer and his NewsHour turned away from Ms. Lewinsky for a note on the possible meltdown of global capitalism or a mention of some hapless Albanians, she would scream at the TV: What about Monica?

Not me. Oh, I kept up with the headlines, the gist of the Starr report, footnote #1 and all that. But when I closed my eyes I had a secret vision. I saw a rowboat. President Clinton was in it, rowing furiously to get away from Kenneth Starr, who was rowing just as furiously to catch him. They, in turn, were followed by a larger ship filled with journalists, all scolding, scolding. I saw Howell Raines knitting his eyebrows like Gregory Peck in Moby Dick. Maureen Dowd shivering with ecstasy at the feast of foolishness set before her. Michael Kelly and Chris Matthews were sharpening harpoons. Sam and Cokie were reporting off the port side and commenting to starboard. They glided away and became small dots on the horizon, then disappeared. I was glad.

I really ought to understand the necessity of aggressive coverage of a presidential crisis, but I was thinking like a civilian. Like some civilians, anyway. Like Morning Edition listener Sarah White, of Seattle, Washington. In September she told National Public Radio's listener line that "I am interested in just about any other news that you may have to share with me other than President Clinton and Monica Lewinsky. They don't affect my life. They don't affect my day. And I'm really just not interested. Let's put some other stuff on the air, folks. Thanks." I'm afraid I was nodding in agreement.

It's worth thinking a moment about White's reaction, and my own, and all the others like us. While I was off the news juice, I was nonetheless listening hard to regular people about the press. Even from those who were fascinated by the scandal, I heard a lot of interesting anger about coverage. "I turn that shit right off," said my sister, the kindly nurse. "The press ground it into drivel," said my wife's cousin. "Exploited it beyond belief."

Many people simply want to close their eyes. The image of our president talking policy on the phone while directing a young woman toward his crotch is not one you want to hold. Nor is the unctuous face of a prosecutor who, by baring to the nation all of the woman's private acts and desires, used and degraded Monica Lewinsky at least as callously as did his target. Not that the thong-snapping intern gets many sympathy votes. Nor Congress, with its vicious games. The whole affair felt dysfunctional and ugly, and we messengers got slimed by the messages that we carried.

But, jeez, were we eager to carry them. We were so quick to make the judgment that this affair was more important than anything else in the world. We were so pumped up with prosecutorial and competitive fevers that people noticed. And some were appalled. They saw us as part of the dysfunction.

High media types argue that this is largely a reaction to their trashy cousins. Evan Thomas, assistant managing editor at Newsweek, said this recently on Charlie Rose: "Anybody who watches five minutes of this nonstop twenty-four hour cable TV, with everybody hyperventilating . . . . There's a bloodlust that's like watching a fox hunt . . . . Journalism has and will suffer from it." But this doesn't quite wash. For one thing, mainstream journalists people those shows. As of October, Newsweek senior editor Howard Fineman had made thirty-eight appearances since the White-House-In-Crisis voyage got under way on Keith Olbermann's Big Show on MSNBC. Olbermann himself has publicly questioned the show's dubious hype. Newsweek's Michael Isikoff, the presidential-sex correspondent, had been on it seven times.

Something about Monica has put high and low media in a blender. There have been weeks when the covers of Time and Newsweek were hard to distinguish from The National Enquirer. Washington has lately had the look and sound of the chase scene in Lord of the Flies. Yet we're to believe that the scandal is not about sex, that if Starr had brought charges of perjury and obstruction related to, say, some old Arkansas real estate deal, it would have received the same amount of space and air.

The verdict of the public -- that the Lewinsky affair was, by and large, overplayed -- seems clear to me. It's not so much the words but the music. People are irritated by journalists who put on their frowny and concerned faces while obviously giddy with the heady joy of running full gallop with the pack.

There will be many press seminars about how we fared. I hope they focus on issues like tone and play instead of the relatively easy stuff, like accuracy and sourcing. Here was a test, admittedly a very difficult one: a big story about sex and betrayal, utterly unseemly, fed and whipped up by manipulators, as private as the workings of a marriage and as public as a globally televised lie. It required accurate and aggressive factual coverage, which, by and large, we supplied.

It also required humanity and restraint, which are hard to define journalistically. But people sense when they are absent. Here we mostly failed, I think, and we lost viewers and readers as a result. Journalists dream of big dramatic stories to cover and dark truths to expose. A presidential sex-and-lies scandal fits the bill. Be careful what you wish for.

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