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BY CAROL LLOYD | The president of the United States calls a 21-year-old for phone sex! A sportscaster fangs a woman on the butt! The Prince of Wales admits to tampon envy! What's next? Videotapes of Newt Gingrich 69-ing a Malamute?

Never has the public been so well-informed about the tawdry details of public figures' private lives. While many are professing shock, dismay and disbelief at President Clinton's alleged behavior, we've all got to 'fess up: It takes more than a sex addict in the White House -- remember JFK? -- to bring us to the present crisis. None of this could have happened without three decades of yellow journalism, lurid talk shows and obsessive celebrity voyeurism. The culture of gossip -- and the multibillion-dollar industry it has produced -- is fueling this scandal from start to finish.

First of all, chief snitch Linda Tripp -- whose "evidence" amounts to gossip run amok -- got the idea of taping her friend's conversation not from a lawyer or the FBI but from Lucianne Goldberg, a literary agent and former Nixon dirty trickster who had been advising Tripp on gathering information for a tell-all exposé on the Clinton White House.

Then there's the issue of Kenneth Starr's investigation. In an editorial in the New York Times, New Republic legal writer Jeffrey Rosen has blamed Starr's unprecedented latitude on two new legal areas -- the Independent Council Act and sexual harassment doctrine -- both of which allow investigation far beyond the limits of most criminal cases. Hearsay evidence, the legal term for gossip, is precisely what the Lewinsky tapes are, yet they have opened the door to wire taps, searches and hardball accusations. But one might argue that these laws spring directly from a culture that believes that the more prurient the rumors, the more relevant the facts. Legal grounds aside, Starr is digging for a brand of dirt that even professional gossips rarely stoop to touch.

Indeed, America's cheesiest, most trivial preoccupations with sex now dominate the mainstream airwaves. Media critics have raised eyebrows at Barbara Walters discussing semen stains on a dress, or Ted Koppel wondering aloud whether "oral sex does or does not constitute adultery," but such initial comments may prove mild as the truth unzips.

Finally, it is no coincidence that it was online gossip Matt Drudge, who publishes his Drudge Report from his home office in a Hollywood apartment, who first spread word of the tapes. His subsequent claim that the White House was "busy checking the Drudge Report for details" confirms that our descent into Geraldoland is complete. Gossip has not just triumphed over hard news, it is hard news. Even the sources themselves depend on it.

Since the press crossed that invisible line in 1969 and reported on Sen. Ted Kennedy's moral and physical plunge into Chappaquiddick, we've grown more accustomed to subjecting famous people's lives to immediate and stark scrutiny. We've also become self-conscious about this change in our mores. Most recently after Princess Diana's death, many debated the ethics of exposing celebrity intimacies with a life-and-death urgency. Yet few posed the obvious question: Why has gossip overtaken public discourse at this moment in history?

N E X T+P A G E: Going cold turkey on gossip

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