It was a week to boggle the mind, a week to make history — a week, in short, to totally fuck up year-in-review roundups. Forget politics stopping at the water’s edge; the principle that was truly upended this past week is that no real news should occur between Dec. 15 and Jan. 2. Then again, the last week in the news really was the year in the news, what with the simultaneous climaxes of the impeachment story and the bombing of — oh, you know, that luminous green country with no people in it. Why bother rounding up 1998? We spent a year there last week.

The same holds for the year’s media news: Its issues and trends were captured in miniature in the overstressed news coverage of the last few days. You want the href="http://www.salonmagazine.com/media/poni/1998/10/13poni.html">influence of the Web on old media? Look at the cable-news networks, which — cramming frames within frames to keep both war and Washington on air — needed only a hit counter and a few bootleg Simpsons gifs to look like poorly designed home pages circa 1995. You want advertorial innovation? No sooner had the military named its assault on — it was someplace in the Middle East, right? — than Fox News Channel tastefully whipped up the logo “Desert FOX,” the latter word in massive gold type, inaugurating the first product placement in a U.S. military adventure. (Might we suggest “The Samsung Korean War II”?) You want reality television? Look at the nose-cone bombing footage that the Pentagon trotted out and feel the pride of living in a country that installs TV cameras even on its weapons. America does not rip your heart out and show it to you before you die; America rips your heart out and puts it on CNN.

But above all, the week proved that there was only one story this year, when impeachment won the airwaves from the hostilities in — Iran! That’s it! (All this proving how silly the “Wag the Dog” postulate was. If President Clinton believed a remote-controlled war against a group of swarthy third worlders would distract Americans for more than half an hour, he wouldn’t have had the brains to get elected in the first place.) It’s only a shame McGwire didn’t end up on Time’s cover, not because “he let us finally feel good about ourselves again” (from last year’s Mars mission back through Cal Ripken Jr., the first Gulf War and beyond, America never really stops finally feeling good about itself again), but because he proved that no subject — from war to the economy to baseball — was too important, exciting or irrelevant to be brought into the tedious embrace of the Story of the Year.

Or Stories of the Year, for that story broke down into two identifiable but not inseparable parts: the Monica story (the sex, the thong, the Altoids) and the legal-political story (the subpoenas, the leaks, the hearings). The highfalutin J-school critique of the media’s performance in 1998 is that while the press admirably covered the legal-political story, which after all involved the potential removal of the chief executive, it was out of line on the sex story, which after all was just a tawdry tale about the president having an affair with a 22-year-old.

But the argument on the Monica story is wrong, and here’s why: It was a tawdry tale about the president having an affair with a 22-year-old. God save our frigid, dead souls the day we fail to get a kick out of news like that. As much as the respectable media liked to tut-tut over the public discourse taking place in the late-night monologues, that was exactly where this story belonged. The legal-political story is the one that really wearied us, and it was, sadly, out of the scandalmongers’ control.

That hasn’t stopped the popular perception that it was scandalmongering that brought us to this pass, though. Sarah Kerr, in a Slate dialogue last week, implied that the media have pruriently stretched out the story: “Take the example of what’s happening this week with the prez. In undeniable ways, the media seem more powerful than ever, more driven to dress up the news as entertainment no matter what the destructive cost. But the public annoyance with this circus shows that though we may not be able to control the entertainment, we’re getting better at tuning it out.”

This “destructive … circus” charge is the standard line by now: the press as troupe of evil clowns, spritzing the foul seltzer of scandal at its helpless audience over and over again. By slavering over scandal, it kept the story alive and buried the president. What this argument misses — and we saw this in the pointless speculations this year on whether public opinion would affect Ken Starr — is that the law doesn’t give a crap whether you pay attention to it or not. In fact, to the extent that it did go crazy over the sex aspects of the story, the press perversely became Clinton’s best friend, unintentionally putting it in a ludicrous perspective that served him best. It flatters journalists to believe that the public hates only those bad apples peddling sensation, that it would approve of us if only we would take our jobs seriously, but really — as Michael Wolff’s “Impeach the Media” poll analysis in New York magazine last month showed — the more we took the story gravely, hand-wringingly seriously, the more the public sickened of it, and us.

We had it all figured out after 1997, didn’t we? After Diana and the paparazzi, we decided the greatest problem in the media was the sleaze-hungry tabloid press. Then 1998 came along and showed us that the tabloid press may be the most responsible institution the country has. At least, in its single-minded attention to novelty and shock, it shows a simple wisdom lacking in our more responsible institutions this year: You gorge on a juicy story until you vomit, then you move on. Remember how the first few weeks of the Lewinsky story — the period truly driven by salacious excitement — was decried as a low point in the tabloidization of the media? Today it looks like a Periclean golden age compared with the sclerotic “It’s just about sex/No it’s not” dialogue that followed: If it started as a feeding frenzy, it lived on as a grim prison cafeteria line. If only the Lewinsky story were cynically driven by entertainment values — it would have died by April.

It is only appropriate, then, that the only genuine, unscripted moments in the news this past week were prompted by Larry Flynt, whose Hustler magazine launched the congressional-sex investigation that prompted Bob Livingston’s resignation as speaker-designate. Likewise, toe-sucker Dick Morris is probably the most egregious wise-man apotheosis on talk TV, but amid last week’s “Wag the Dog” flurry he was a comparative voice of reason, appearing on Fox and nailing the hypocrisy, given their Gulf War track records, of both the Republicans’ loose-cannon attacks and the Democrats’ shut-up-and-support-the-troops rhetoric. Morris may be an unprincipled sleaze, but the great thing about sleaze at a time of dazzling, universal hypocrisy is that it’s nonpartisan: The only thing it’s against is cheap sanctimony. Indeed, when — if — this story ends, the most lasting changes in our politics may have been wrought by the tabloid sex wallowers, who, by performing a sort of aversion therapy on the public, have done more than the intelligentsia to ensure that adulterers can now proudly run for office.

The responsible media, on the other hand, managed to take what should have been a perfectly thrilling wallow in bodily fluids and turn it into a joyless, vengeful, href="http://www.salonmagazine.com/news/1998/01/23list.html">yearlong kick in the ass. As 1998 commenced we resolved to reap the lessons of 1997, and we reaped them good and hard. We grew up and got serious; we started the year href="http://www.salonmagazine.com/archives/to/col_weav.html">unzipped, we ended it href="http://www.salonmagazine.com/archives/to/media_eric.html">unspun. As we finish up the holiday season and get ready to party like it’s 1868, does anyone out there feel better off for it?

The dying, however, at least have the excuse of ill preparation and understandable stress. The living, compelled to offer a sign-off, are on the hook. All of which is to say that I have no proper, Wildean or Wellesian last words to offer you in my last media column for Salon: no big catchy answer, grand wrap-up, fiery, Old Testament jeremiad. Partly because I’m too young to have the perspective and too old to have the arrogance to do it. Partly because I’m not retiring, just moving on to do related writing for a different master.

But it’s also because the world is becoming full of big explanations regarding the media that are reductive, tin-eared and wrong. Popular media — news, entertainment, print, online, broadcast, cable, radio, publishing — are so all-encompassing that, I believe, having an overarching theory of the media is like having an overarching theory of the weather. Is it good? Bad? Dangerous? Indispensable? Sure — all of the above.

Like the weather, the media form an environment we can’t escape if we wanted to, one that we affect even as we’re affected by it. In the simplest sense, the media are all the forms by which people in a society share information and thoughts. To “hate the media” is not just pointless, it’s misanthropic. I’ve done enough crabbing in this space the past two years that I doubt anyone reading my archives would consider me a Pollyanna. But I love the media in all their excess. There have been times, cranking out this column, that I’ve felt my brain shriveling and wanted never to look at another men’s magazine or cable-news show again. But thank God I live in a time when there are entire cable channels dedicated to houseplants, when I can download Serbian protest music composed while B-52s drop my tax dollars on the artists from 40,000 feet, when I can pull up news wires from my bedroom or flip through a magazine for remarrying brides. Any world without handy Internet resources for Brazilian fingernail fetishists is not a world I want to live in.

But today this is a love that dare not speak its name. Make a statement like “TV Is Good,” like ABC did, and you’ll get jumped like a playground dope-pusher. A media writer who doesn’t particularly like the media, though, is worse than useless. Likewise, anybody who purports to cover politics or society and doesn’t get popular media, and there are plenty of them, is wasting the audience’s time. You can learn more about this country watching one night of Comedy Central than you’ll discover in a half-dozen Campaign 2000 stump speeches.

When I started this column two years ago, I was tired of “media criticism” that was either biz gossip or critiques of news coverage — the sort of earnest yawn you still see on “The PBS News Hour.” The great thing about writing on the media is that it means writing on everything: religion, music, literature, politics, sex, money, art, technology, business, food and gardening.

The drawback about it, too, is that it’s about everything: The media form a big, sloppy amorphous blob — one of those handy, fuzzy bugaboos like “society” or “the system”– and, to boot, one that’s all about the transmission of ideas. From there it’s a short step to the argument that the media are controlling the way we think.

And you know, people talk about mass thought control like it’s a bad thing. So media criticism has become especially attractive to the ideologically frustrated: people who are ticked off that their favorite political movement, cultural camp or god is having rough sledding, and have decided it must be because of de facto media cabals and brainwashing. If only their fellow citizens were fairly, thoroughly informed, they’d naturally vote and behave as they properly should — it’s an implicit theme from William Bennett to Norman Solomon. Particularly around the release of “The Truman Show,” this became the big media critique du jour: An inescapable media-industrial complex had turned all life into a massive entertainment, robbing us of free thought and volition.

Back in January, I attacked the weak but attractive argument in “Life the Movie” by href="/media/1999/01/cov_27mediaa.html">Neal Gabler that the media were turning all of modern life into entertainment. This month, this Gablerian line is updated after Littleton in Harper’s — an excellent cultural magazine that’s somehow become dedicated to being dead-solid wrong on media criticism, giving writers like Thomas Frank and Jonathan Dee copious ink to argue that a media-entertainment-advertising machine is co-opting independent expression. This makes it effectively hopeless, the argument goes, to escape or resist consumer culture, because the machine will just take your resistance — your sarcasm, your independent art, your politics — and defang it by embracing it, repackaging it for the masses in the language of value-free, innocuous irony. (Harper’s has probably done more than any publication except maybe Frank’s Baffler to turn “irony,” a time-honored literary device, into a swear word.)

Thomas de Zengotita’s article in Harper’s, “The Gunfire Dialogues,” is so fuzzy, meandering and jargon-laden — lots of “reflexivity” and “levels” here — that I doubt it will have much influence, but it makes an interesting, and I’m afraid trend-setting, advance. It links the Gablerian and Frankian big-media-octopus theories — “everything” is an entertainment spectacle; the media are turning us into over-ironic drones — with the culturally conservative attacks on violent or supposedly nihilistic popular media that have gained strength after Columbine. “The influence of today’s media [is] qualitatively different from yesterday’s,” the piece says. But the problem isn’t as simple and specific as media violence equals school shootings; it’s the bigger, shadier, “reality of virtuality” (more about the non-definition of this term in a minute). As attackers of mass media are already massing under the unbeatable aegis of The Children, the article weds their heartsickness and panic to the vague language of the entertainment-as-disease crowd; that is, mass media damage everybody, and if we can’t quite say how, that just makes them scarier. For example:

Saying, “Well, millions of kids listen to Marilyn Manson and never harm anyone” misses the point. Those kids are just as influenced in a different way by the totality that is this virtual space. They go ironic rather than psychotic. They are the “apathetic” ones, for whom politics is, at best, a field of self-expression in which certain people identify with certain issues and “promote awareness” of them — a politics in which issues have fans.

This is barely a taste of the vague, unsubstantiated, meretricious gobbledygook here — apparently we don’t need any further explanation why listening to Manson must necessarily lead either to psychosis or a detachment that has vague, but rest assured negative, political repercussions. (No doubt it’s the only thing keeping, take your pick, Paul Wellstone or Gary Bauer out of the White House.) “Overall violence among teenagers, in school or out, is dramatically lower,” we’re told, but never you mind: “those [media] stimulations might have powerful effects on [nonviolent kids], perhaps just as corrosive in subtler ways.” If you’re counting, that’s two qualifiers — “might,” “perhaps” — in service of the insinuation that millions of seemingly good kids are in fact suffering from “effects” as “corrosive” as murderous psychosis.

Hey, why not? That “totality that is this virtual space” sounds pretty nasty! I’d define it, or “the reality of virtuality,” or whatever, if only the author had bothered to. But why? We all know what it is, right? It’s that new stuff, that — well, that everything people of taste are offended by. That bad fake stuff that conjures a false reality and poisons minds (as opposed to the good fake stuff that also conjures a false reality — music, theater — but is performed in Lincoln Center rather than suburban basements). Shortly, the author switches to the term “the new technologies.” Which are? Video games, partly. But also movies and news. “OJ and Diana and Monica.” And — the kicker — “Times Square and sanctioned graffiti.” If you’re wondering at this point just what the hell he means, it’s no wonder: You are clearly an ironic, apathetic automaton, rendered affectless and numb by “new technologies” that, as nearly as I can tell, include paint.

I wouldn’t harp on one obviously pained response to a mass killing if it weren’t so representative and so potentially useful to censors and self-censors — and if its fatalistic assumptions weren’t so typical. “From ‘The Truman Show’ to ‘The Matrix,’ a slew of recent movies is exposing the project built into these technologies,” the author writes. But “traditional opinion leaders” don’t want to address it because their “material interests … are increasingly vested in the immaterial economy.” But as I noted about “The Truman Show” last year, it was the organs of big media — for instance, Entertainment Weekly and Time (my next employer) — that took the lead in inflating a fine, creepy satire (which the movie was) into a daring, original critique of the modern media complex (which it emphatically wasn’t).

I’m sure there’s an answer to that, too. The voices of power in “corporate central” (that’s a phrase, by the way, from a “Truman” review not in the Nation but in EW) incorporate just enough dissent to neutralize it, etc., etc. I could argue against that, but as a future Time Warner storm trooper — albeit one who’s made the same argument before — I suppose there would be little point. So I’ll say this: If it is true, we might as well give up. And yet the audience hasn’t given up. It is more skeptical and distrustful of the media — especially the news — than ever, yet it consumes media heavily, follows media business dealings closely and questions the media astutely. It is influenced by mass media like earlier audiences were influenced by books and family and religion (and the way today’s audience is, too), but in unpredictable, idiosyncratic ways, not robotically. It wants the media, without always having to like them.

People have a complex relation to the media; and I suspect non-media critics know it better than many of their lofty spokespeople do. “Our world is becoming so intensely reflexive that distinctions between action and performance and reality and representation are eroding at every level of our lives,” de Zengotita bafflingly writes. I suspect it’s more like this: Facile media critics have eroded the distinction between their hyperbole and the way this condescendingly rendered “we” actually lives.

And in fact the Harper’s Readings section includes a piece by MIT media-studies professor Henry Jenkins, about the anti-media hysteria at a post-Littleton congressional hearing he attended, that is as brilliant and sensible as “Gunfire Dialogues” is misguided: “Adults are feeling more and more estranged from the dominant forms of popular culture,” writes Jenkins, a dorm housemaster who discussed his testimony with kids and prepared for it by consulting Goth friends. And, “All of us move nomadically across the media landscape, cobbling together a personal mythology of symbols and stories.” Finally — and don’t let Neal Gabler catch you saying this! — “Real life trumps media images every time.”

I’d like to give Jenkins a medal for this piece. Shockingly, millions of people watch television, consume Disney entertainment — even visit Las Vegas! — and yet not only manage not to mass-murder their neighbors but remain able to fall in love, believe in higher powers and value abstract principles. It is simply wrong, futile, lazy and a self-serving excuse to talk about the media as if they compose an outside entity — the way many lazily consider “the government” and “the economy” — that only does things to us while we’re powerless over it.

Which is not to say that the media don’t need fixing. I said above that you can no more have a grand theory of the media than of the weather. But you can study the climate: specific long-term trends and concerns. Even as I’m going to write for a media conglomerate, I do believe the consolidation of media ownership creates thousands of chances for business considerations to trump editorial; at the same time, readers and viewers need to remember that even “independent” outlets are beholden to somebody. And even as I leave an online publication, I do believe that online publishing and broadcasting will have huge influences on mass media, some beneficial and some rife with potential conflict and mistrust. Online magazines like this one are adding commercial features, while commerce sites like Amazon.com and Garden.com could become the most influential “magazines” online, and all these changes are couched in the mealy-mouthed language of service and empowerment; the more online media become mass media, the more their principles will become accepted for everyone.

But it’s important to distinguish specific, identifiable problems from malaises and bogeymen that only feed reactions like the lingering one to the Littleton shootings. There’s no point denying that the incident aroused a sense of indefinable and pervasive ill in America — one that paired perfectly with that vaguely defined, pervasive target, the media. But blaming your problems on an invincible, mind-controlling media force does you no good — whereas recognizing what you want from media outlets and what they want from you (attention, money) at least allows you to make consumer choices, which are arguably more powerful, and at the least more plentiful, than votes. Here’s where the weather analogy breaks down; everybody complains about the media, but you actually can do something about it — more than ever, as media choices metastasize across the newsstand, cable and your desktop at work.

All of which, of course, has made it a great time to cover the entire freak show here at Salon, and likewise an exciting time to pick up and write on TV at Time. Anyone who wants to reach me can continue to do so at jpon@interport.net, where I promise to try to improve on my last words.

Now — as Orson Welles or Herman Mankiewicz probably never said, though I wish they did — time to knock off work and go get properly loaded.

This is not a lament: The IPO was announced long before I jumped, and I was hardly going to buy a country — certainly not a good country — with my minor stake in it. What’s a little sad, really, is that I’ll be missing out on my little piece of the 1999 Zeitgeist, the chance, when I’m gray and doddering, to be like one of those old guys who really did do the Charleston and swallow goldfish in the ’20s. More important, even though I wouldn’t have been Croesus-ized, I could have at least let people think I had. Now I will not have the chance to be mentioned in a Dave Kansas conversation.

You probably haven’t had a Dave Kansas conversation, unless you’re a working journalist, in which case you certainly have. Kansas became the young editor of TheStreet.com after leaving the Wall Street Journal to his colleagues’ snickers; the financial site went public in May, as a result of which he held options worth at one point about $9 million, though the stock’s fallen since. (Because of the spate of articles that followed, which naturally estimated his wealth at its peak, the guy will be forever saddled as the $9 Million Man even if the stock never comes back. At this writing he’s in the $4 million neighborhood, if you’re counting.)

I’ve had Dave Kansas conversations. They start with light-hearted head-shaking. They contain phrases like “out of nowhere!” and “dumb luck!” and “windfall!” They detour through conversations about one’s family, one’s future plans, one’s educational and vocational choices. They end with wan, smiling stares into the middle distance.

Internet IPOs have been going on forever — months, years even — but until recently they particularly blessed people who are supposed to get rich. Whatever the fact of journalists reaping the stock boom says to the general investing public (e.g. “Sell! For the love of God, sell now!”), to the journalistic community it means that IPOs are suddenly lifestyle news. The Washington Post, New York Times and others did Dave Kansas stories. New York magazine released its envy issue (precipitating the question of precisely which issue of that gazetteer of the swank life is not the envy issue), with Alex Williams’ href="http://www.nymag.com/this_week/view.asp?id=2431">affecting essay including an account of idly chatting years ago about “the allure of selling out” with hardworking young reporter Dave Kansas.

Well, what else is new? Writers, journalists are liberal arts people by trade, which means they can make a third the money of their college friends yet be five times as guilty and neurotic about it. Let Esquire’s Tom Junod land a contract that pays him like a mediocre NBA rookie with an incompetent agent, and his compeers will carp as though he’d taken Nazi gold. But while the current market may have changed the numbers fueling our drunken rants, has it actually changed the business of journalism?

(Giggle alert: I am about to use the terms “Internet” and “the long term” in the same sentence.) I suspect the Internet IPO windfall that offers hope for writers in the long term is not Dave Kansas’ but C. Everett Koop’s; the former surgeon general took his site drkoop.com public for a paper payday of, at one point, $56 million. (It’s sort of poignant, by the way, that the blizzard of coverage for Koop’s windfall ignored the fact that he’d been involved with a Web site — anyone remember Shape Up America? — since href="http://www.shapeup.org/dated/102996.htm">1996; but hey, that was before the Internet started printing money, so who cares, right?)

The reason is that employee stock options, unlike entrepreneurial payoffs, are simply another form of compensation. New-media bosses offer them to attract talent — a gamble in lieu of the attractions an established offline company might offer. That’s the case now. Call me a cynic, but I don’t think that there’s anything inherent in the Internet that will force its employers to be more generous, or less greedy, than their old-media analogues. If the Internet ultimately becomes sufficiently fledged as a medium that one can, say, spurn the Wall Street Journal for TheStreet.com without attracting notice, there will eventually be no need for new-media employers to sweeten the pot with options. If it doesn’t become thus fledged, obviously, the options won’t be so attractive forever.

(Mind you, none of this is to say that journalists getting in on IPOs today won’t profit handsomely in the meantime: I’m not a stock analyst, and I certainly hope they do, if for no other reason than the possibility of some of them buying me drinks someday.)

Either all publications will start magnanimously giving away equity, on- or offline, good times or bad — in which case I also expect chocolate-flavored snowfalls — or employers will offer what the market will bear. But Dr. Koop’s cash-in is something different: as Robert X. Cringely pointed out in the New York Times, it’s a well-known person being able to sell equity in his name. Journalists, for the most part, spend their careers building their names, only to rent them for relatively small sums to venture capitalists. If someday writers, having turned themselves into brands, can own those brands, that would be a real transfer of power rather than simply another employee benefit. The Washington Post’s “Media Notes” columnist, Howard Kurtz, ended his Dave Kansas story, “How does MediaNotes.com sound?” He can laugh, but I hope he dropped a line to these nice German chaps with a generous buyout offer.

The other question starting to be raised is whether journalistic wealth is healthy. A recent Newsweek article quotes a journalism professor who says students, offered stock options instead of $20,000 starting salaries, are “asking aloud whether they can be idealistic about journalism and get a piece of the pie at the same time.”

To which I say: Kids, nothing will kill your idealism faster than your
first pay-stub at $20K a year. What’s puzzling is the sense that a
journalist’s striking it rich off his craft is inherently harmful, which
likewise seems the subtext of exercises like Brill’s Content’s href="http://www.salonmagazine.com/media/log/1999/04/20/salaries/index.html">publication
of journalists’ salaries (though I agree the information is of some use
to readers).

OK, you can argue that wealthy journalists become out of touch with the
common man. But a journalist should be able to understand any group of
people, and can’t belong to all. (And here’s a dirty secret: Good
writers do not become writers because they are so much like their
fellow man. They become writers because they believe they know
better than their fellow man.) Of more concern is that online
writers and editors, who already know perhaps too well href="http://www.salonmagazine.com/media/col/poni/1999/05/06/msnbc/index.html">what
pieces draw traffic, will start making editorial decisions like
publishers — which in fact they will be. But this pressure (please the
market or lose money) may be largely redundant with an old-fashioned,
stronger editorial pressure (please the market or you’re fired).

How much is a writer worth? Nothing. How much is a writer worth? A hundred million bucks. How much is a writer worth? Whatever that writer can get. If Dave Kansas can get $900 million honestly, God bless him. It’s plenty possible, conversely, to earn $25,000 a year without integrity. It’s wrong — not to mention stupid — for writers to make their work solely about the money, but if anything, an indigent writer may be more corruptible than a rich one. Corruption is not about how much you have or how much you’re offered; it’s about how much you want and what you’ll do for it.

If you know the answer to that question, well, you can always give Dave Kansas a call. And if you’re reading this, Dave? I drink Manhattans.

O.J. Simpson, Mr. Higgins reported, was slumped down in his Bronco in the driveway of his home; we couldn’t see him, from our helicopter-cam vantage point, but Mr. Higgins said he could. Was he still alive? Did he really have a gun? Was he pointing it at anyone? “I see O.J.,” Mr. Higgins told Jennings. “He looks scared.” Then he announced, “Baba Booey to y’all!” and cut out.

“Baba Booey,” we know now, is a Howard Stern catch phrase, and the call was a hoax. And with it, that anonymous pinhead became one of the great faceless figures of my internal historical chronology: contemporary media’s equivalent of the itchy trigger finger at the battle of Lexington or the unknown Chinese civilian who stared down the tanks at Tiananmen Square. Peter Jennings was not the first news anchor to be Baba-Booeyed. But in that moment, when one Stern soldier pantsed the ABC anchor on national television, in the middle of the defining media episode of the decade, the balance of power in America changed.

It was a dumb, unoriginal and arguably racist prank (the caller was using what the Washington Post’s Howard Kurtz charitably described as “an obviously fake ghetto accent”). It was significant, in fact, precisely because it was so stupid, so risible from the first syllable. Because it was so obvious. Somebody should have known better, I’m sure you were thinking, if you watched it. Except somebody didn’t.

The call summed up, for better and worse, the media environment that would come after it and crystallized much of what had come before. If it was the moment that I became a media critic, I don’t mean that in any momentous, epiphanic sense. It was also was the moment that caller became a media critic. It was the moment you did. “We are at moments like that,” Jennings would later good-humoredly say, “reduced to roughly the same level as that of the audience.” But the media, this time around, did not get back up.

Media critics do not generally use “O.J.” as a shorthand for anything good. On our eternally downward-trending graphs, “post-O.J.” means “after everything was shot to hell” — after, that is, the news degenerated into a nightly cavalcade of arguments and shock news. The news-chopper mania, the “World’s Greatest Police Chases,” the selling of stories to the tabloids.

I don’t think that’s particularly true, or particularly useful: All that stuff was manifest before the murders and would have continued with or without Brentwood’s controversial resident (or, for that matter, Brentwood’s next controversial resident). That “post-O.J.” mentality results from a wrongheaded, patrician assumption that the Simpson case was an overblown trifle played up for ratings. It was played up for ratings, of course — there’s no denying the Dancing Itos — but just as the trial convinced many people that the Los Angeles Police Department had framed a guilty man, it also showed that a story could be both trumped up and truly important.

People may have been interested in the case because O.J. was a celebrity (a relatively faded one by 1994, though we tend to forget that now), but they became involved in it because it captured real and important issues. There was race, of course — a subject so successfully ignored this decade that even the Los Angeles riot couldn’t make it a campaign issue — but also class, money and celebrity, and, entwined with all of them, power. The trial became a national checkup on the state of social mobility in America — a national conversation, if an uncivil one, more comprehensive than any the Clinton administration has tried to arouse. What people realized about the case, and why it was far more significant than the media’s tut-tutters recognize, was that the important thing would be not so much whether Simpson was found guilty as why. (Appropriately for our era of relative truth, we got two answers to the first question and several to the second.)

We wouldn’t have had that experience in earlier years, when news and cultural decisions were driven from the top down, made by Olympian professionals who called the shots, often with great wisdom but also with a general belief that important news was made in cities like Washington and New York by men in suits: that it was a great thing for democracy if citizens stayed glued to, say, the Kefauver hearings, but that it was somehow an equally disgraceful thing if they spent a year and a half following the minutiae of a criminal trial — the same stuff that civics teachers struggle to keep eighth-graders awake for. If you’ve spent your entire life thinking of your profession as a giant ziggurat with the White House press room at its apex, you cling longer to the old-fashioned notion that things like voting and legislation have the greatest effect on the way people live. The public recognized that the problems of two people — Ron and Nicole — told a much larger story, whereas the elected representatives of millions didn’t mean a hill of beans in this crazy world. (Earnest media attention notwithstanding, for instance, the government was just then, unsurprisingly, bungling national health care.)

By the time Al Cowlings pulled that Bronco onto the freeway, the public was driving the media. Our big public explainers had lost their absolute command of our consciousness. Competition, from outlets like cable TV, was one reason, the Cold War vacuum another: There was no more great overarching national narrative to prioritize the news, and nothing forcing the public to stick with the great explainers if it didn’t like their choices. Therefore, the audience didn’t exclusively receive its culture from the same three networks anymore, and they, in turn, didn’t always understand the audience’s language anymore. You can attribute much of what we’ve seen in the media this decade — talk radio, call-in shows, chat rooms, instant polls — to ratings and immediate gratification, but it’s also the recognition that one had to start listening to the audience, and even involving them, in order to thrive.

That’s what was so poignant about Jennings’ being flatfooted by that caller, apparently not immediately understanding that “Baba Booey” meant he’d just been had. In O.J.’s America, you didn’t need to be a teenager to have your own confounding subculture anymore. Mr. Higgins had his Howard Stern subcult and was shoving it in ABC News’ face: “You think you know something I don’t? Well, here’s something you don’t know!” (That’s part of the basic appeal of Stern, who’s always defined himself through his conflicts with media authorities, from big broadcast companies to the FCC.) And that moment of boggled disconnect presaged the next year’s, when trial-watchers in the media saw the jury announce a quick verdict and concluded, “Well, they must have found him guilty! The jury had its own alien subculture, where having evidence planted in your house is easily as believable as a hunk of lab equipment determining a man’s guilt.

Even in the country of Andrew Jackson, we tend to think that institutions are lessened when they open themselves up to the public; hence the implicit hierarchy in Jennings’ line about being “reduced” to the audience’s level. In past breaking news events, the elites were there to put the rest of us in our place: Walter Cronkite, accused by a caller — unaware she was speaking to Cronkite himself — of crying “crocodile tears” after JFK’s assassination, responded, “Madam, this is Walter Cronkite, and you are a goddamn idiot.” Or they would put underlings in their place: There was ABC’s Frank Reynolds, after being fed the erroneous line that James Brady was killed in the Reagan assassination attempt, barking, “Let’s get it nailed down, people!” on air. But the night of the Simpson chase the audience, essentially, reached out and put ABC television in its place.

I’m being unfair to Peter Jennings here, because it wasn’t just Jennings or ABC or even TV alone being brought down. No one seemed to know what they were doing that day. I still have a clipping of the most hilarious typo I’ve ever seen in the New York Times; it ran the next morning. The caption to two photos read, “The chase began on Interstate 5 near El Toro, in Orange County, and ended about 50 miles away at Mr. Simpson’s home in Los Angeles.” But the photos — whether an outright mistake or a joke that didn’t get torn down in time — were of 1) O.J. running a play with the Buffalo Bills and 2) O.J. being served tea by Leslie Nielsen in one of the “Naked Gun” movies.

The Bronco chase was the signal event of a period in media that would offer people great opportunity and responsibility, when our viewing and reading choices would be myriad, often unedited and frequently unreliable. We would be able to see much but not necessarily to believe everything. We would all become aware of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, conscious of our own role as viewer-participants (as when the police shooed helicopters from coming too close and disrupting the scene, raising the specter that we might, vicariously, have killed O.J.). We would have to become either media critics or suckers. The chase was gripping and newsworthy for all the familiar reasons — the suspense, the slow-mo surreality, the hero’s-last-run irony, the funeral/party atmosphere of the “Run, Juice, run!” gantlet of fans — but that wasn’t why it was, in the end, important. It was important because it made all of us part of the media.

You, me, the police, Peter Jennings and Larry King — none of us except O.J., and maybe not even O.J., knew if we were about to see the death of a man on national TV. While we sat and watched dusk fall over O.J.’s driveway, waiting for something, the network anchors’ comments weren’t any more elucidating than those of the guys you’d been watching the Knicks game with — and they probably weren’t as funny. The ABC news department, the New York Times — they may have been professionals, but they were visibly, demonstrably, fallible like anyone. And none of us had a claim on the truth at that moment. So why shouldn’t it have been you giving the play-by-play?

If “interactivity” was the media buzzword of the ’90s, Mr. Higgins was its poster child. His prank call was network TV meeting public-access cable. It was the Internet, years before the Internet became popularized. That is, it was the battle cry of the universal mike-grab, for better and worse. It was tasteless and irresponsible and cruel, and it epitomized a decade in media when talking back to the TV would become an art form (see “Beavis and Butt-Head”), whose most representative voices would be those that offended proper sensibilities — RuPaul, Roseanne, “Beavis,” “South Park,” the Farrelly brothers, Todd Solondz, Web sites like Salon and Drudge and, certainly, Howard Stern himself, who’s both an unapologetic ass and a biting, smart commentator.

Of course, that could have happened with any live event. There was something else about O.J. that made him the perfect leveler between the media and its audience — he belonged to both of us. We tend to forget, after two trials and a thousand on-air excommunications of the man, that O.J.was not just a target of the media but a full-fledged member: not just a football star and pitchman but an ABC sportscaster who worked, lunched and played golf with the media elite — he had gotten inside in a way that mere money didn’t generally get a running back or a black American.

So when newscasters covering the chase said, “We just don’t want to believe that this man we’ve loved all his career can be guilty,” that we had a couple of meanings. In one sense, the surface one, it was you: that big, fake, warm “we” that embraces the audience and wishes, now more wistfully than ever, for permission to speak for it. But in the other, subtextual sense, it was, emphatically, not you: It was we, the guys who wear the network blazers and the makeup.

Soon enough, it would become de rigeur to swear him off — soon Charles Grodin’s career arc would take him from former star of “Beethoven” to crusading anti-O.J. fulminator to, well, former star of “Beethoven.” But for the moment, broadcasters like ABC’s Al Michaels and KCBS’s Jim Hill reminisced about their friend and colleague and even broke the fourth wall to beg him to surrender. They drew aside the veil separating the audience from the Elysian 19th hole of sports greats and TV stars and reminded us that the white Bronco we were following wouldn’t have looked out of place in their own driveways.

It was a vulnerability they couldn’t afford to maintain. O.J. knew this better than any of us, even as he knew that that world was all slipping away from him. During the chase, Michaels noted that O.J. had told him by cell phone the day before, “I have to get out of the media business.” He kept that promise, on and off, willingly and not, over the next five years, vowing seclusion and selling a videotape; cutting himself off one day, phoning up TV talk shows out of the blue the next. From that Friday night on, however, the rest of us were in the media business to stay.

EW isn’t alone; the show’s just-opened curtain call is receiving perhaps the greatest huzzahs ever to greet a summer of reruns. (The Washington Post’s Tom Shales writes, “Some reruns do seem too grand for the term ‘rerun.’”) Tom Carson in Esquire hailed the rer — sorry, encores — last month; more recently, Stephen Holden wrote in the New York Times, “It just may be the greatest work of American popular culture of the last quarter century,” which in turn may be the greatest work of critical hyperbole in, oh, the past couple weeks.

What’s interesting is not so much the level of attention, considering that a) it’s a fine and witty series that b) is about the mob, allowing those fuggehdaboudit ruminations on manhood and honor and generational change that have been critical faves since “The Godfather.” It’s that this wide, mainstream attention is going to a show on HBO, a premium subscription channel available in a minority of television households, albeit a growing one.

What you don’t much hear is this question: Isn’t it a shame people have to kick out a couple hundred bucks a year to get this? Now, that may not be a critic’s job, but, effectively, they’re increasingly writing to a self-selecting group of fans who dispose growing chunks of income on supplemental entertainment — the televisual equivalent of the “lobster medallions ($10 supp.)” on a restaurant menu. (The analogy isn’t completely strained: Food critics, unlike entertainment critics, have long had to decide whether a restaurant’s prices should figure into its rating.)

This is no knock against premium channels, which deserve credit for realizing that high-quality original programming is key to attracting subscribers. In fact, they may be further mainstreaming themselves by gaining customers with shows like “The Sopranos.” In the process, though, they’re accelerating a trend: the economic multi-tiering of not just TV but all popular culture.

One factor in this emerging caste system is demographic: “Will and Grace” and “Frasier” for one bracket, WWF for another. The number of channels has allowed programmers to slice the audience many ways, and socioeconomically is one of the most popular. But another factor is simple dollars and cents: How much is information and entertainment worth to you? It’s long been possible to spend more money on accoutrements — expensive stereos, popcorn — but now consumers can drop top dollar on content too. We hear a lot about the splintering of the media audience, but it’s not just because there are so many choices. There are also a greater number of price points.

Mass pop culture used to be no-tiered; that’s what made it “mass” and “pop.” Suppose you defined an RDA of American Popular Culture (RDA-APC) — that diet of broadcast and reading that one had to ingest to be current with what co-workers were talking about, magazines were writing about and other entertainers were parodying. What did it cost in 1959, 1969? A couple of movie tickets a week? A TV set with rabbit ears, later upgraded to a nifty rooftop antenna? A transistor radio?

Today, you need cable, no question. You have probably rejected something called “basic” or “standard” cable, which is, of course, too basic even to consider: network channels, a channel-guide channel. Instead, you’ve decided you need the second option, also probably called “standard” or “basic,” which communicates that you are really getting, albeit at a premium, the de facto minimum, which it now is: cable news, Animal Planet, “South Park,” what have you. Add a couple of premium channels. Beautiful! You’re RDA-APC-TV-OK! (Oh, you’ll be wanting digital TV in a couple years. Start saving.)

You’ll want Internet access — can’t download those movie trailers without Internet access! — and though you may, like many Americans, do most of your surfing at work, that requires a white-collar job, with desk, computer, bathroom breaks and all the fixin’s. If not, or if in any case you want home access, there’s the computer, the all-you-can-eat ISP account, the second phone line to take advantage of said account. (We’re banking on those lengthy site visits, folks.) Fortunately, you won’t need that second line for long — broadband’s coming! (It’ll cost you more.)

And there are plenty of tiering opportunities left. Movie theaters are flirting with premium reserved seating, and Universal’s Edgar Bronfman Jr., suggested ticket prices should vary on the basis of movies’ budgets. The idea hasn’t caught on, but there could yet come the day when movies offer a Barney’s-to-Wal-Mart spectrum: you can pay $25 for a Will Smith fourth-of-July skyrocket or $3.50 for a romantic comedy cast entirely with Mentos commercial alumni.

Premium channels have been around — and offering marquee series like “Larry Sanders” — for a long time. But their growing reliance on original series (Showtime is heavily promoting the coming “Beggars and Choosers”) changes the TV dynamic. When the channels mainly trafficked in Hollywood films, they were offering a bulk discount on movies. The deal with original programming is just the opposite: Pay us more for the same type of programming (albeit hopefully better) you get from the networks. If the trend continues — enlisting more subscribers and drawing creative talent away from networks and basic cable — the price of critic’s-darling series could rise by a couple of Franklins a year.

Add in the overnight price increases effected when the music industry embraces a new recording format. Inflated concert prices. Tele-ticket fees to ensure a seat at the movies. Several-dollar surcharges for major museum shows — ironically, the ones with the broadest appeal, the Monets and whatnot, set you back the most. (If you want the whole list, listen to an NPR pledge drive, where hosts constantly break down the pile of loot you blow annually on pay media that could instead subsidize those charming href="http://phc.mpr.org/performances/19990130/rafiles/990130_powdermilkbiscuits_28.ram">Powdermilk Biscuits spots.) Pretty soon Entertainment Weekly, metropolitan newspapers and so on are assuming that you carry a monthly culture bill of a couple of hundred bucks, before Raisinets.

And it’s not mere elitism. Critics, contrary to popular belief, like to write about quality work; but, perhaps unavoidably, they have to write to an audience sector willing to pony up for it, even on TV. And you have to wonder whether this could ultimately affect editorial content. Magazines want to offer advertisers affluent readers. What better way to do that by focusing on those readers’ preferred media choices?

Tiering could prove good for media consumers in some ways: Many, I bet, would welcome the chance to buy all their cable channels a la carte, rather than pay for a slew they never watch. And a flexible movie-pricing plan like Bronfman’s could, ironically, benefit higher-brow indie film attendance — you could have seen “Pi” with the change under your sofa cushions. (While we’re at it, how about wealth-redistribution movie theaters, charging on a sliding income scale: From each according to his ability, to each according to his taste?) There will still be a mainstream, wherever it shifts. But it’s costing more to swim there.