_______________SALON'S COVERAGE OF THE CLINTON CRISIS (01/21/98- 08/26/98)
	Now that Bill has apologized to us, shouldn't Monica apologize to Hillary? Or doesn't the woman who went to D.C. to get her "presidential knee-pads" think she's done anything wrong? -- Dennis Seals Portland, Ore. You people are a bunch of commie liberal pigs. Your kind are the ones that help put this filthy pervert and his slut wife inside our White House. Please don't stop publishing your dirty little rag, people need to know who are our real enemies !!!! -- Richard G. Sanders The great mystery of the Clinton sex scandal is why the N.Y .Times and Washington Post have been so hostile to Clinton and willing to let their reputations serve as cover for Starr. That is the big story that we won't ever read in the "newspaper of record," and why Salon's coverage is so important. -- William S. Kessler Only a magazine from the land of fruits and nuts could publish an editorial such as that by Clinton Butt Boy David Talbot calling for the summary dismissal of the investigation into Clinton's criminal conduct -- JUST before the report is issued to Congress. Obviously he is preaching to the choir in an attempt to buck up the other CBBs. And in the interest of gender equity let's not forget the female Clinton Knee-Pad cheerleaders. Sorry, boys and girls, he's going down and you're still in denial. I, for one, am going to throw a hell of a party the day he's forced out. -- Michael J. Butler What scares me is that we will have a country where the media no longer reflects the people. A media so far removed from how people live their lives that it will cease to be relevant. The newspapers and TV obsess about Clinton's sex life despite poll numbers that reflect that he is still well liked and regarded as competent. At every turn, people have said that they want the media to move on, not focus on this for hours every day. Yet, the pundits act as if the masses of people are idiots, unaware of what they want or need from journalists. News readership is down, news viewership is at record lows. This is not an accident. If there is a crime in this mess, fine. Report on it. If not, let's move on. The media should stop spending time worrying about Clinton's credibility and worry about its own. -- Stephen Gilliard New York Frankly, even you arrogant, self-important elitists know that Clinton is guilty of far more than has leaked out (leaked of course by Clinton's allies, not Starr's team). You also know that he is not only unfit to lead this nation, but is actually destroying the Democrat Party. You also know he is toast. It is not a matter of "if" he will be forced out, only when. -- Carl Oman Salon's Clinton coverage has been more thorough and detailed than that of any other source I've seen. This, however, is hardly a good thing when even the American public doesn't care (according to CNN). Perhaps it's because I'm Canadian, but the Clinton coverage has finally reached the point of ridiculousness. I'd rather see the columnists currently dedicated to analyzing semen stains put to better use -- when was the last time we heard anything about Madeleine Albright? -- Devin Carless
_______________WILL MOTHER JONES BECOME MORE POLITICALLY CORRECT? BY ASHLEY CRADDOCK (08/24/98)
	Ashley Craddock got something tellingly wrong in her report on the departure of editor Jeffrey Klein from Mother Jones. She says one of Klein's "missteps" was to have "passed" on a story of mine about growing up in aerospace culture, which Harper's then ran. Actually, my first go at the subject was a 1990 piece on the then-tantalizing prospect of a peace dividend, which ran in Mother Jones before Klein's arrival. Two years later, Harper's assigned me a personal essay touching on some of the same themes, and Jeffrey, still not at Mother Jones, kindly shared with me his considerable insights about high-tech warfare, Pentagon priorities, etc. Thus, my story belonged to Harper's before Klein ever took over Mother Jones. The urge in Salon, as in just about every other media outlet, to critique MoJo's woes as a failure of personalities and "politically correct" politics overlooks a more basic, structural problem. Mother Jones, ceding the academic left niche to the Nation, has always made it its mission to compete with the highly designed newsstand glossies. That costs a lot of money to produce and distribute. Advertisers, who want tightly defined, affluent demographics and no risk, have no incentive to subsidize Mother Jones for its readers, so it's no bargain to buy. Forever in the hole, the magazine is lucky to come out once every couple of months, further dulling its buzz. (The $300,000 debt that Craddock calls "unprecedented" sounds pretty close to what we were running back in the late '80s when I was a senior editor there.) Most magazines would have folded long ago faced with such bottom line factors. But millionaire Adam Hochschild and lesser donors have kept Mother Jones alive while staff after staff tried every editorial angle on the left side of the radius. All its editors, those disparaged by Craddock and those not, have shared this same economic box. None have managed to break out. It would be refreshing to read in Salon, itself a highly subsidized attempt at alternative media that is losing millions of dollars, some analysis of how the media market works against an ongoing, nonmainstream experiment like Mother Jones. -- David Beers Vancouver, B.C. I thought Ashley Craddock's piece on Mother Jones was very well-written and engaging. And, as someone who interned there myself, I think Jeffrey Klein is a brilliant man. But I wonder if Ms. Craddock's friendships with some of the staffers made the article miss the mark. When I was there on Market Street, I was always somewhat perplexed by the absence of many of the editors and other staffers, who seemed to use the lull in the bi-monthly schedule to sleep in or take off. The magazine has floundered because the staff, collectively, let it. No one there was working New York hours. -- Seth Kaplan
_______________THE TRUTH ABOUT GUIDEBOOKS BY DAWN MacKEEN (08/17/98)
	As the former head of a well-known travel guide company (years ago), I was entertained by Dawn MacKeen's article on inaccuracies in guidebooks. She's absolutely right that sending people on absurd itineraries with clearly insufficient money is a recipe for errors; of course, getting free rooms and meals is as well (when was the last time you saw a truly negative hotel review in Fodor's?). An amusing sidelight to this is the set of errors that are willfully introduced into the guides by a bunch of punch-drunk student editors in the middle of the night. Underpaid themselves, and minimally supervised, editors at the guidebook company I worked for would routinely stuff the books with inside jokes, wildly distorted descriptions of museums and tourist attractions and completely fictitious restaurant listings. All of this was supposedly in the interest of humor, although undoubtedly the only people these figments of imagination entertained were cave-dwelling employees like myself. And truth be told, I stuck in my fair share of sophomoric inside jokes -- sticking friends' parents' houses in as historic buildings and so on. I have no idea whether these shoestring travel guides have sobered up since then; fortunately I've outgrown youth hostels and rail passes. And in the grand scheme of things it probably doesn't matter much, since -- as MacKeen points out -- all guides are created more or less equal. -- Ravi Desai SALON | Aug. 27, 1998

R E C E N T L Y+| SALON EDITORIAL: ENOUGH! BY DAVID TALBOT

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