And that was only the beginning of what has become the most intense debate anywhere in the nation about academic freedom in the wake of Sept. 11. Al-Arian’s “O’Reilly” appearance triggered hundreds of phone calls and e-mails (as well as death threats) from critics outraged that USF would employ the supposed “terrorist.” Three days after his Fox appearance, university president Judy Genshaft suspended the Palestinian-born Al-Arian with pay, ostensibly for his safety and that of the university community; just before Christmas, she fired him.

Genshaft made no pretext that Al-Arian’s academic performance was at issue; he is both tenured and popular with his students. Al-Arian was terminated, she said, for failing to make clear he was speaking for himself and not the university when he appeared on Fox, thus making USF the vortex of right-wing fury about his views. “We are experiencing a level of disruption that no university anywhere is set up to deal with on an ongoing basis.”

The question raised by Al-Arian’s firing — Can a university punish controversial speech by one of its professors? — is not only polarizing Tampa Bay, it is sounding alarm bells throughout academe; and the story of how this local spat caught fire like autumn leaves suggests how fragile the national psyche remains four months after the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks. The firestorm has pulled in Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, who personally appoints USF’s trustees and has praised Genshaft’s move, and Fox attack-dog Bill O’Reilly himself, who has defended the Palestinian academic’s right to his views and denounced the university president for firing him.

The firing has been criticized by the American Association of University Professors and the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. On Thursday, Al-Arian will get a chance to defend himself to the university’s administration in an appeal required under his union contract.

The Al-Arian story, like so much about Sept. 11, did not begin with the hijacking of those four airplanes. Instead, it goes back nearly a decade. In the early 1990s, Al-Arian, along with other Palestinian exiles in the Tampa area, founded an Islamic studies center at USF, inviting speakers ranging from mainstream to radical. “What we were trying to do,” Al-Arian recalls, “was foster dialogue” across the broad range of Islamic political opinion. Al-Arian himself — who taught in the university’s engineering school since 1986, and also serves as the imam of the Islamic Community of Tampa, where he founded a well-regarded parochial school attended by over 200 children — emerged as a passionate defender of the Palestinian intifada, occasionally given to the kind of hotheaded rhetoric familiar from liberation movements the world over. And he helped establish a charity to raise money for the families of Palestinians killed in the uprising.

USF first caught heat for its professor’s political commitments in 1994. That year, terrorism maven Steve Emerson produced a controversial PBS documentary called “Jihad in America.” It interspersed video footage of one of Al-Arian’s anti-Israel speeches with images of Sheik Abdul Rahman, the blind cleric convicted in the first World Trade Center bombing, who had once appeared at one of the USF center’s conferences. Emerson, citing anonymous sources, labeled Al-Arian’s center “the primary support group in the United States” for Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

Emerson, it should be noted, is no neutral observer of the Islamic scene; a New York Times review of his 1991 book “Terrorist” found it “marred by factual errors and by a pervasive anti-Arab and anti-Palestinian bias.” He lost much of his credibility as a journalist when he rushed to proclaim Timothy McVeigh’s Oklahoma City bombing the work of Muslim terrorists, but his stock recently rose again thanks to the insatiable hunger for “terrorism experts” post-Sept. 11, and he regularly appears on cable news shows. Al-Arian considers his 1994 documentary “a classic example of guilt by association,” and traces his present plight to Emerson’s never-proven allegations.

Controversy returned a year later when the former co-editor of the USF center’s journal, who had disappeared after just six months’ work, turned up in Syria as general secretary of Palestinian Islamic Jihad. The FBI, apparently convinced the center was a front for terrorism, seized its computers, videotapes and files and froze its accounts; USF, painted by the media as “Jihad U,” suspended Al-Arian with pay and hired a prominent Tampa lawyer to conduct its own independent investigation. After 15 months the FBI and the university both cleared the center of any connection to terrorism or Palestinian Islamic Jihad. A federal judge later affirmed their findings, calling Al-Arian’s enterprise — which by then had folded its tent — “a reputable and scholarly research center.”

But that wasn’t the end of the saga. Apparently still hoping for pay dirt, Tampa FBI officials decided to arrest Sami Al-Arian’s brother-in-law, a soft-spoken scholar named Mazen Al-Najjar, for unspecified terrorist associations. Al-Najjar — the brother of Al-Arian’s wife, Nahla — had arrived at Tampa in 1981 and earned a doctorate at USF. Al-Najjar was arrested under then new antiterrorism laws allowing suspects to be held on the basis of secret evidence, without the precise charge being revealed in court. For the next three and a half years, Al-Najjar would remain in Bradenton prison without anyone — not his lawyers, not even the judge — ever seeing the purported evidence against him.

The secret-evidence arrest of his brother-in-law galvanized Al-Arian and his family. While continuing to teach at USF, Al-Arian threw himself into building a national effort to challenge such cases. “The whole idea of secret evidence,” he recalls, “was so repugnant, such a repudiation of everything we thought the American system stood for.” The radical campus speaker evolved into a canny coalition-builder, winning friends in Congress ranging from the liberal David Bonior to conservatives like Henry Hyde and Bob Barr and rallying Tampa religious leaders to the case. Indeed, prior to September 11 Congress was close to passing a bill sharply restricting secret-evidence trials.

In May of 2000, a no-nonsense federal judge declared Al-Arian’s brother-in-law’s detention unconstitutional, an immigration judge declared the terrorism charge unfounded and a year ago December Mazen Al-Najjar at last went home to spend Ramadan with his family.

Then came Sept. 11, 2001. The terror attacks on New York and Washington left Al-Arian and his family both sickened and fearful. “This is un-Islamic by every definition, to have innocent people being killed. I don’t see anyone who can claim religion here. This is an evil act,” he told local papers. Members of the mosque donated blood, and Al-Arian helped organize an interfaith service. Muslim schools in the area immediately received threatening calls. “This is worse than any nightmare could be,” brother-in-law Mazen Al-Najjar told a reporter. “I am sad for every reason, for what happened to the victims, for what happened to the world.”

It was, Al-Arian thought, to talk about the Islamic community’s response to the attacks that he agreed on Sept. 28 to appear on “The O’Reilly Factor,” a show he had never seen. Instead, host Bill O’Reilly peppered him with the very charges from 1996 that had long ago been discarded by the FBI and discredited by a federal judge. The transcript is almost comic in its crude tabloid-like melodrama: USF “may be a hotbed for Islamic militants,” O’Reilly warned his audience. He quoted a speech Al-Arian gave 15 years ago: “You did a little speaking engagement in Cleveland, and you were quoted as saying Jihad is our path. Victory to Islam. Death to Israel. Did you say that?” Al-Arian tried gamely to defend himself, saying that “death to Israel” meant “death to occupation, death to apartheid.” He also tried to point out how similarly incendiary President Bush’s talk of a “crusade” seemed to much of the Muslim world.

O’Reilly wasn’t having any of it. “I appreciate your coming on the program, but if I was the CIA I’d follow you wherever you went. I’m saying I’d be your shadow, doctor.”

In a sense, that was exactly what happened. O’Reilly’s interview, and several Fox rebroadcasts, inspired hundreds of e-mails and calls to USF, and numerous death threats. That barrage of mail landed on the desk of USF’s president, Judy Genshaft, who had taken the job just 18 months earlier. And Genshaft was faced with a dilemma: How to balance those threats with the tradition of academic freedom?

Genshaft’s initial response, three days after the O’Reilly show, was to suspend Al-Arian with pay. It was, she declared, a step designed to protect both professor and campus. “I will protect this university as a safe and secure learning environment,” she said, and pointing out that Al-Arian was not under any investigation by the FBI or police.

In retrospect, it seemed a move designed to buy time. And it didn’t work. After O’Reilly, the Tampa Tribune — the more tabloid of the area’s two major newspapers — decided to make a crusade of its own, ressurecting the years-old charges in its editorial pages and news columns, branding Al-Arian a “hate-monger” in its headlines. (By contrast, the more sedate St. Petersburg Times, while criticizing his old speeches, declared that Genshaft’s “first responsibility” was to protect an academic’s right to speak.) Soon the university changed its tune from protecting Al-Arian and the campus to protecting the campus from Al-Arian, warning him in an October letter that he risked disciplinary action should he even set foot on campus after hours.

Still, controversy did not abate: “The death threats are not subsiding,” Genshaft sighed in early October. And as the controversy rose, so did the political stakes: Genshaft’s boss, after all, is Gov. Jeb Bush, the president’s brother. Over the summer, Bush had stopped by the USF campus and delivered a speech on academic freedom, but that was then and this was now.

Finally, on Dec. 19, the school let drop the other shoe: Al-Arian was fired, effective immediately. The professor, Genshaft said, had not made it clear on Fox that he was speaking for himself and not the university.

It was a peculiar accusation: Professors who appear on TV programs are hardly expected to issue such boilerplate disavowals. But Genshaft won immediate support from her boss. “Professors have the right to say things that are unpopular,” Bush said. “But they do not have the right to disrupt the life of a university.” Al-Arian, he declared, “continues to make very provocative statements” — as if provocative statements are grounds for firing a scholar. None of the Florida press corps, apparently, thought to point out that it was threatening callers, not Al-Arian, who were doing the disrupting — or that Al-Arian’s offending rhetoric had been uttered when today’s USF students were still in elementary school.

While Genshaft may have pleased Bush, her decision to fire Al-Arian elevated the case into a high-profile academic freedom controversy. And in a bizarre irony, one of the first to leap to the professor’s defense was … Bill O’Reilly. “You don’t sack a tenured professor for saying stuff you don’t like,” he growled on his program. “This president of the University of South Florida should resign. She’s a coward.”

For Al-Arian’s family, the firing comes at a particularly painful time. In late November the INS rearrested his brother-in-law Mazen Al-Najjar. No secret charges of terrorism this time: Instead, the INS is moving to deport him for overstaying a long-expired student visa. But as a stateless Palestinian he has nowhere to go, and supporters say the Justice Department is using his case to create a precedent for unlimited detention of Palestinian deportees.

In some ways, as a civil liberties issue, Al-Arian’s firing pales beside his brother-in-law’s second detention. After his earlier three-and-a-half-year stint in prison, with secret charges against him, again Al-Najjar is accused of no crime. But he is now being held in solitary confinement, in a maximum-security federal prison, strip-searched twice daily and forbidden contact visits with his family.

Yet the firing of a university professor for his views, past or present, has its own profound and disturbing echoes of witch hunts past. The plight of the Al-Arian family — one member jailed awaiting deportation, the other fired from his teaching post — recalls the precise conditions that inspired the creation of the American Civil Liberties Union during World War I: on the one hand, roundups of immigrant radicals, and on the other hand, the firing of antiwar academics like James McKeen Cattell, the founder of Columbia’s psychology department, and political scientist Scott Nearing, who after being fired from the Wharton School of Business, achieved cult status for books on “Living the Good Life” in rural Vermont and Maine.

The very institution of academic tenure was created to ensure that scholars feel free to speak out on public controversies, whether in or outside their official academic portfolio. What’s more, in a world haunted by terrorism, the stakes in the Sami Al-Arian case go beyond civil libertarian abstraction. If anything helps fuel terrorism, it is a sense that politics cannot work. Sami Al-Arian may be a militant Palestinian nationalist — but he is a militant who proved to himself, and to his communities both in the US and abroad, that politics and democratic institutions like courts can work, by clearing his name and freeing his brother-in-law. Firing Al-Arian because of public hysteria over spurious charges turns the hiring and firing at USF over to a gang of hecklers and telephone thugs. And like the rearrest of his brother-in-law, it sends a disquieting worldwide message that democracy will betray those most clamoring for it.

Instead, for two hours CNN presented Bush advisor Karen Hughes, conservative Republican senators Orrin Hatch and Sam Brownback, Dr. James Dobson, founder of the conservative group Focus on the Family, Bush Cabinet member Tommy Thompson, Republican pollster Frank Luntz, conservative commentator Tony Blankley, conservative Republican presidential candidate Alan Keyes, and the conservative deputy director of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. Not only did no Democratic elected officials appear on screen, but CNN didn’t present one Democratic-leaning pollster, consultant or columnist to utter a stern word in protest. (And don’t blame the Democrats — according to a party official, “there was no conscious decision to keep anybody off the air” that night.)

For some reason it fell to a few nonpartisan doctors and entertainers, such as Mary Tyler Moore, Montel Williams and Christopher Reeve, to deliver muted criticisms of Bush’s stem cell decision.

For those looking for evidence that CNN, rattled by the surge in ratings for Fox News, was skewing to the right, the evidence that night seemed clear. Days earlier Walter Isaacson, the new chairman and chief executive of CNN, had visited exclusively with Republican leaders of Congress in a reported attempt to patch up relations with stalwart conservatives. Was CNN now trying to dispel the perception that it was, by any stretch of the imagination, “liberal”?

But ramping up the percentages of on-air conservative pundits and Republican flacks may not be the only prong in CNN’s comeback campaign. Taking its cue from the Bush-cheerleading Fox, it is also imitating the new kid in town in a fashion that could only put a smile on the face of Fox’s founder, Rupert Murdoch, the king of the screaming headline. The all-news network, for most of the summer, suddenly became the all-Chandra Levy network.

So is CNN going tabloid and sucking up to conservatives in order to play catch-up with Fox? CNN says no. “CNN since about 1990 has been in an extremely competitive environment,” says Sid Bedingfield, executive vice president and general manager of CNN U.S. “And the way to win viewers is to do the best and most compelling journalism out there. That’s the mandate we’re reacting to.”

Whether or not CNN is veering to the right will be a never-ending topic of debate for media pundits. But anyone who watched the network this summer could hardly fail to notice that CNN also doesn’t mind occasionally aiming for the bottom. With the Chandra Levy story, the network struck double gold: a tawdry story with a Democratic Congressman involved that longtime Clinton critics, like Barbara Olson, just can’t get enough of. It’s all about the numbers. Fox’s ratings are growing at a heady clip; CNN’s are not.

A little perspective: During August 2000, in cable households where viewers could choose between both news channels (CNN is in 82 million cable households, Fox News is in 68 million), CNN averaged 360,000 viewers in prime time, compared to Fox’s 289,000, according to Nielsen Media Research. (That’s cable TV’s dirty little secret: Very few people actually watch the all-news channels.)

Fast forward one year to August 2001, and riding the Levy wave CNN’s average among households with both CNN and Fox News jumped to 430,000 prime-time viewers. Fox though, ballooned to 498,000.

“The numbers are terrifying for CNN,” says Brent Baker, vice president of the Media Research Center.

Terrifying not just because the network is getting beat on a tawdry summer sex scandal, but because CNN even lost ground on the biggest legitimate news story of last year, the Florida vote recount. When the story first broke Americans reflexively tuned to CNN, which drew the largest audience. By the time the Supreme Court handed down its ruling in Bush vs. Gore, Fox was on top in prime time.

“CNN’s in a tricky spot,” says Dow Smith, associate professor of broadcast journalism at the Newhouse School of Public Communication at Syracuse University. “In terms of the evolution of the organization, if they screw this thing up they could kill CNN. They could ruin the brand, ruin the value.”

Kill a media giant that turned a profit of $350 million last year? It’s possible, says Smith, who points out that in the world of cable television economics, perceived value is everything. That’s because local cable operators pass along a portion of each subscriber’s monthly bill to cable networks in exchange for allowing the operator to carry the programming. CNN, along with ESPN and MTV, is perceived as a must-have and receives among the highest compensation rate from cable operators. (One industry source estimates roughly half of CNN’s $800 million in revenue last year came from subscription fees, the rest from advertising.)

But if Fox continues to gain viewers at a breakneck pace (the network is up 144 percent year-to-date) and leaves CNN in its ratings wake, while MSNBC develops into a solid second or third choice, the day could come when operators decide they don’t have to pay CNN as much in sub fees, or even leave CNN out of the channel mix all together.

“Those cable operators are brutal,” says Smith. “If there’s no value, they won’t pay.”

This, at a time when AOL Time Warner bosses, having just laid off 400 CNN employees, are looking for the network to post double-digit gains annually.

The stakes couldn’t be higher, which is why Isaacson may be remembered as the man who either saved or lost CNN. (He was not available to comment for this article.)

This isn’t the first time Isaacson has been called in to turn around a venerable news title. Prior to CNN, Isaacson was managing editor at Time magazine, where he was credited with rejuvenating Time, breathing new life into the stodgy title with a mix of young writers and a populist, even daring, approach to cover stories. Isaacson jumped the gun by pronouncing John F. Kennedy Jr. dead on the cover of a Time “Commemorative Issue” three days before authorities found the remains of Kennedy, his wife and her sister. Some critics called the move presumptuous, but the bold stroke paid off at the newsstands; the JFK crash cover was the magazine’s bestselling issue of the year, posting 1.3 million in sales.

Isaacson’s makeover of Time did not translate into more readers, though. The magazine’s circulation has remained essentially unchanged (albeit creeping downward slightly) for nearly a decade.

While the selection of Isaacson to run CNN was widely applauded, the move did come with one uncomfortable irony. As Time magazine’s managing editor back in 1998, it was Isaacson who was forced to pen a full-page apology to readers for the Tailwind fiasco, that infamous, synergistic debacle between newly married CNN and Time. The later-discredited blockbuster investigation reported that in 1970 the U.S. military used deadly nerve gas in Laos and killed American defectors. “Valley of Death” aired on CNN. Its producers wrote a print version for Time magazine, both of which are owned by Time Warner. Time published the story (albeit with a question mark in the headline) despite questions about “the substance and the sources and the evidence of the story,” according to one Time editor at the time.

American Journalism Review dubbed the incident “one of the biggest journalistic embarrassments in the news weekly’s 75-year history.”

Of course the Tailgate debacle should not be pinned on Isaacson, but if CNN is moving to the right and simultaneously going tabloid, he is sure to be held responsible.

On July 11, just days after being tapped to run CNN, Isaacson appeared before 200 writers at the Television Critics Association’s annual dog and pony marathon out in Pasadena, Calif., to hype CNN.

Also a Harvard alum, Rhodes scholar, world class Southern schmoozer and ever-willing pundit (“Isaacson may not be a household name, but it’s not for lack of trying,” wrote USA Today in 1999), Isaacson was his usual articulate, passionate self that day as he laid out a vision for CNN. It was a vision anchored in excellence: “That’s a very important mission, to do journalism, to actually get stories right and to report them honestly and fairly. I don’t think you have to go tabloid to get ratings.”

At almost the precise moment Isaacson was speaking, CNN’s “Talkback Live” was airing yet another discussion on Chandra Levy’s disappearance. In fact, on July 11 CNN ran 22 segments on the Levy story, including six entire programs devoted to the topic.

There, a former homicide investigator with no firsthand knowledge of the case was busy contradicting D.C. police, insisting Rep. Gary Condit was “a major suspect” in the “murder” of Chandra. Before wondering out loud whether Chandra “was pregnant” at the time of her disappearance (she was not), he said he was sure that “if anyone gets indicted in this case it’s going to be [Condit].”

Hours later CNN host Greta Van Susteren, co-anchor on “Burden of Proof,” wondered if Condit would have been able to erase any trace of “blood evidence” in his apartment before police searched it. (The guest assured her Condit could not; no blood was ever found in his apartment.)

Looking to liven up the discussion, she asked her on-air expert to “assume hypothetically there was a struggle” in Condit’s apartment.

That night on “Crossfire,” co-host Robert Novak mentioned how Condit “did have a big sex life.” This was all just from one day, July 11 — the same day Isaacson assured the press that CNN wasn’t going “tabloid” in pursuit of ratings.

One week after Isaacson’s address to the Television Critics Association, the San Francisco Chronicle ran an interview with Jamie Kellner, the former head of the WB Network. Kellner, as the newly minted chairman and CEO of Turner Broadcasting, hired Isaacson to run CNN. In the Chronicle, Kellner shot down industry speculation that CNN was perusing former president Bill Clinton as a talk show host. Kellner told the paper Clinton had made it clear the show was not a priority for him at that time. And besides, Kellner stressed, “CNN would be interested only if we could have a show that’s balanced.”

That seemed to be more than a passing reference to complaints fostered by Fox News and other conservatives that CNN, founded by proud liberal Ted Turner, leaned too far to the left politically. Kellner appeared to be signaling that CNN would become increasingly scrupulous about not currying favor with either political party.

Yet the ink was barely dry on the Chronicle when CNN’s Isaacson journeyed up to Capitol Hill for a Republicans-only rendezvous, meeting exclusively with conservatives and longtime CNN critics. The Hill newspaper Roll Call, suggesting CNN was playing catch-up with the unabashedly conservative Fox News, quoted one Hill staffer this way: “[Isaacson] is panicked that he’s losing conservative viewers. He said, ‘Give us some guidance on how to attract conservatives.’”

The public condemnations were swift. “It’s shocking and embarrassing for CNN to be groveling like this,” says Peter Hart, analyst for the liberal media watchdog group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting. “It violates every notion of what standards for journalistic ethics should be.”

Just as that drama was dying down, it was revealed that CNN had entered preliminary discussions with Rush Limbaugh about having the conservative commentator join the CNN team.

Would CNN be interested in Limbaugh only if his show were “balanced”? More importantly, would CNN court Republicans Tom Delay and Trent Lott, or revel for four months in a story about a consensual affair, if Fox News weren’t breathing down its neck?

Some TV pros argue Isaacson’s visit to Capitol Hill only telegraphed CNN’s fixation on Fox’s newfound influence.

“[Fox News chief] Roger Ailes has always been in their face, now he’s in their head,” says Reese Schonfeld, former CNN pioneer who served as the network’s first president. (Those at CNN insist the episode was blown out of proportion and that Isaacson never asked Republicans how to court conservatives.)

But Alex Jones, director of the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, defends Isaacson’s trip to Capitol Hill. “Why not have a meeting with Tom Delay? Walter is trying to save his network. If conservatives are abandoning CNN to go to Fox, then he’d want to find out why. But Walter needs to know what the arguments are, to get a bill of particulars, and if they’re out of whack to take that into account. But when your competitor is eating your lunch, you’d be a fool not to respond.”

Perhaps the better question is does CNN even have a liberal bias? Or is that ongoing campaign just smoke and mirrors, an attempt to throw CNN off stride?

“Might Fox want to use this against us? Of course, that’s Roger Ailes’ style,” says Aaron Brown, who recently left ABC News for CNN, where he’ll soon anchor an evening newscast. “But it doesn’t have much to do with the truth or the facts.”

FAIR’s Hart agrees: “Right-wingers and Republican Party operatives have argued about that and complained for years. But they’re long on rhetoric and short on facts.”

A recent FAIR report studied guest bookings on CNN’s prime-time news show “CNN’s Wolf Blitzer Reports,” and found that of Blitzer’s 67 partisan guests between January and May of this year, 39 were Republicans and 28 were Democrats. By contrast, 50 of the 56 partisan guests booked during the same time on Fox News’ nightly “Special Report with Brit Hume” were Republicans.

“Conservatives get a fairer shake on CNN than liberals get on Fox,” agrees Jones.

There are additional signs CNN is treating Bush quite gently. CNN’s signature weekend political chat show, “Capitol Gang” (executive-produced by conservative columnist Novak), recently expanded to a full hour, which, on Aug. 18, gave conservative panelist Kate O’Beirne time to tape a segment pitching softball questions to Karen Hughes on the lawn of the White House. (“You’re a very cohesive group. Where does that come from?”)

Perhaps that’s why even strident Republicans are now offering up solid grades and even faint praise for CNN’s job in covering the new Bush administration.

“I haven’t seen any red flags that got me hopping out of my seat and screaming at the TV set,” says conservative Wall Street Journal columnist John Fund.

“I’d give them a B, and that’s higher than all three of the networks,” adds Baker at the conservative watchdog group the Media Research Center. To really win conservatives back, “it would take them doing something dramatic in prime time. Something like hiring Rush,” he says. (“If Rush Limbaugh is on he will be in a limited fashion and designed to reflect political perspectives from both sides of the aisles,” explains one CNN executive.)

While the catcalls from the right subside, the accusation of a liberal bias continues internally at CNN, from longtime host Bob Novak, according to one senior CNN source.

“It’s continuous and his line is always the same: ‘I’m the only true conservative at CNN.’ Walter [Isaacson] comes to town and Novak pulls him aside and says, ‘I’ve been in D.C. for 43 years I know the answer to CNN’s problems: It’s liberal.’ Walter says no, it isn’t. Novak says regardless, it’s perceived that way. You need to make the pilgrimage to the Hill. That was all Novak.”

Asked for a comment, Novak said he had “no interest in talking about that at all.”

Chandra Levy, of course, is a topic CNN can’t stop talking about. Despite the fact that the news organization has not broken a major story during the four-month scandal, CNN, by a cautious count, has devoted more than 200 separate shows to the Levy story. And more than 50 since Condit’s interview on ABC two weeks ago. By comparison, during that same two-week period, alleged serial killer Nikolay Soltys, accused of stabbing to death six family members in Sacramento, was on the run from the law for 10 days, and the subject of a massive law enforcement manhunt. CNN found room for just 10 shows about that case.

CNN’s tenacity on the Levy story caught some CNN competitors off guard early on. “I was very surprised that they stayed with the story,” says one senior Fox News executive.

A CNN spokesman stresses that even all that Levy coverage still only represented a fraction of its summer stories.

But the feeling among some internally is that the tabloid tone of the Levy coverage has been unmistakable and “has probably been a reaction to Fox,” says one CNN source. “What choice do they have?”

The network’s Levy performance has enraged some journalism pros. “CNN’s been appalling, just disgraceful,” says Jones at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. “It’s been a mistake and it’s not responsible journalism.”

CNN’s Bedingfield offers no apologies: “I think it’s a story of great interest to our viewers. It’s a mystery. There’s a public official at the center. You have law enforcement involved. There are a lot of angles. And I happen to think it’s a real news story.” (In July, CNN gained 200,000 more prime-time viewers, compared to July 2000.)

“The Chandra Levy story is sort of an exaggerated self-parody of what’s wrong with TV news,” argues Robert Jensen, associate professor of journalism at the University of Texas. “Why in the world does anybody even have to offer up a critique? It’s just absurd on the face of it, and highlights how trivial American journalism has become.”

Jensen was referring to CNN’s “Ground Hog Day”-like prime-time lineup this summer of returning pundits who endlessly chewed over a stagnant story, seemed to get most of their expert information by reading the morning papers, and then spun webs of what-ifs, with many trying to stitch together a workable narrative that put Condit at the center of Levy’s disappearance. The whole time CNN hosts were careful never to poke holes in the paper-thin scenarios.

Says Bedingfield at CNN: “I’m not in any way embarrassed by our coverage of the Levy/Condit story.”

Indeed, Isaacson had instructed his troops not to “hold their noses” when pursuing the story, according to the New York Times. Despite that, one CNN source says, “the hand-wringing that takes place has been pretty extensive.”

Which explains one reason why CNN is in such a bind; its competitor is busy playing by a different set of rules. Or does anybody think Fox News’ Paula Zahn did much hand-wringing the night after she invited a psychic on her show to reveal the supposed whereabouts of Levy’s body?

“You can’t compete with Fox on their terms,” warns former CNN president Schonfeld.

That’s something the cable news giant may have to learn for itself.

But the fact that it was a close relative of one of the candidates who helped make the call doesn’t trouble Rupert Murdoch’s right-wing cable network in the least. To the rest of the journalistic community, it may represent a new low in conflict of interest, but to Fox, hiring a man who recently wrote “I am loyal to my cousin, Governor George Bush of Texas. I put that loyalty ahead of my loyalty to anyone else outside my immediate family” is sound editorial policy. The only thing that troubles Fox is that Ellis, a vocal Clinton and Gore critic, violated company policy by swapping proprietary information with cousins George and Jeb (that stands for John Ellis Bush) in phone conversations on Election Night.

In an interview with the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer, Ellis bragged about how he spent much of Election Night on the phone with his cousins talking strategies and exit-polling. Mayer deftly lets Ellis hang himself with his own self-important words: “At 2 a.m. Ellis called his cousins and told them, ‘Our projection shows that it is statistically impossible for Gore to win Florida.’ It was just the three of us guys handing the phone back and forth — me with the numbers, one of them a governor, the other the president-elect. Now, that was cool.”

It was also a violation of company policy. The data Ellis was reportedly swapping with the Bush camp (post-New Yorker, he now denies it) came from Voter News Service, a media-backed consortium that gathers crucial, hush-hush voting information on Election Day. According to a Boston Globe news report during the primary season, “Fox News chairman Roger Ailes warned staffers to keep exit poll results to themselves and reiterated Fox’s policy not to ‘broadcast, publish or disseminate outcome projections’ based on exit poll data before poll closings.”

Ailes, of course, is the former Republican political image-maker who in his earlier incarnation coached George W. Bush’s father.

On Monday, when the New Yorker hit newsstands, Fox News vice president John Moody admitted that Ellis had erred, but defended hiring him, suggesting it would have been unfair not to hire him simply because of who he was related to — a remarkably genial interpretation of conflict of interest. By Tuesday, after the revelations of Ellis’ information-trading, Moody came down harder, saying that Fox was pondering disciplinary action against Ellis for misusing his position of power at the channel.

Since Ellis was working for Fox as a consultant on a 30-day contract, that point seems moot.

But Ellis isn’t just a Bush cousin who happens to work in television and stumbled into an awkward position on Election Night. He’s a former Gingrich foot soldier, a raging partisan who is steeped in the Clinton-hating tradition of the far right. (That’s something the Los Angeles Times, Associated Press, New York Times and even the New Yorker itself have failed to report in recent days.) Fox, of course, knew that.

The cable network describes Ellis as a “number cruncher.” But that bland description doesn’t exactly fit the Republican attack-dog columns Ellis penned during most of the ’90s for the Boston Globe, and more recently for the New York Press.

To Ellis, President Clinton is an “amoral” “sexual predator” who occupies “a morally berserk universe.” Under Clinton’s depraved leadership, Ellis wrote, America faces a grim fate: “It will get worse before it gets better, because the truth is, it will never get better until Bill Clinton is gone.”

There wasn’t a flimsy Clinton-hating conspiracy that Ellis didn’t sign onto — Chinese spying, Whitewater, Vince Foster, hush money. Watch here as Ellis goes 0-for-6 in just one Clinton-bashing paragraph: “He lied about Whitewater. He lied about Castle Grande. He lied about the firing of the White House travel office personnel. He lied about his staff’s mishandling of FBI files. He lied about the circumstances surrounding the suicide of White House counsel Vince Foster. He lied about a vast White House effort to hush up former assistant attorney general and convicted felon Webster Hubbell.”

As the Monica Lewinsky story began to break, Ellis was positively breathless in that Matt Drudge kind of way: “The end could come with astonishing speed. Senior Democratic Party officials were already beginning to speak of how they might execute the president’s departure. It’s over. Clinton is finished. The rest is endgame.”

One week later, more of Ellis’ keen prognostication was on display: “There are reports all over Washington that Clinton is planning to fire Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr. More shoes are expected to drop in the various Clinton investigations.”

Ellis wasn’t above using his columns to flak for his cousin, either. Marveling at Bush’s reelection win in Texas, Ellis (who usually informed readers about his family connection), wrote, “The scope of Bush’s victory left seasoned professionals in awe.” It certainly seemed to leave Ellis in awe, as evidenced by the following heart-drenched effusion: “Bush loves his life. He loves his wife and daughters. He loves his family and friends. He loves his job. He loves his home. He loves Texas, a state that is a nation unto itself. When he wakes up in the morning, he can hardly wait to get to work.”

Fox News execs say they didn’t hire Ellis because of his “bloodline.” They must not have hired him for his political foresight, either, because his crystal-ball record is abysmal.

On the eve of the ’98 congressional elections, Ellis, like every other GOP true believer, was confident that “Clinton is to the Democratic Party what the Titanic was to its passengers. He’s taking everybody down with him.” Wrong. Fed up with the impeachment hearings, voters dealt the GOP a humiliating blow.

Hillary’s Senate campaign in New York? “She will not win because her candidacy isn’t about New York, or the people who live here, or what she might do for them. It’s about her. The moment New Yorkers collectively understand this — that they’re being used — will be the moment that her candidacy curdles. What might have been ‘you go girl’ will become ‘just go away.’”

Imagine how Ellis felt working the Fox News Decision Desk when it had to call the New York Senate race as a lopsided win for the first lady.

As for Gore, Ellis wrote this summer that he was a “goner,” that his advisors would never allow the vice president to select a Jewish running mate, and that, barring a dramatic shift, there was “no Electoral College math that works” for him.

So let’s get this straight. Fox hired a partisan Bush cousin — who thinks Gore’s campaign practiced “stupid politics,” that Hillary Clinton is “immoral” and her husband “loathsome” — to run a crucial part of its election coverage. He spent Election Night on the phone with the Republican candidate and his closest advisors reportedly swapping embargoed voting data. And he was able, through his flawed call of Florida, to create the false impression that Bush had won the election.

Who needs a vast right-wing conspiracy when you’ve got a vast right-wing network?

And why did Reno act as she did? “The Clinton administration always seems to want to do the communist bidding in the communist, thuggish style, and I think it’s sickening.”

But Keyes’ fire and brimstone passions were tempered by sage words from now-former Miami Police Chief William O’Brien, who was more or less ousted Friday for permitting one of his officers to accompany INS agents on Reno’s Raid. “I refuse to be the lightning rod of divisiveness in this community,” said O’Brien, offering his resignation from the force. “I refuse to be the chief of police in a city that has someone as divisive and destructive as Joe Carollo as mayor.”

Wall Street brokers Anne Michele Lyons and Paul Kuhns, appearing in the Washington Post’s “Reliable Source” offered some perspective. The two have booked Wye Plantation for their wedding Saturday night, and Lyons apparently isn’t too happy about having to share quarters with the boy who came from the sea. “He’s had his day for the past few months. This is our day.”

That’s certainly egghead reading material. But at the next debate, when CNN’s Judy Woodruff asked Bush what lessons he had drawn from Acheson’s career in foreign affairs, he barely answered the question, offering only familiar bromides from his stump speech, such as “we must promote the peace” and “free trade brings … hope and prosperity.”

Moments later, Sen. John McCain, in a less than subtle dig, called attention to Bush’s vacuous response by making a specific reference to Acheson: “When Dean Acheson walked into Harry Truman’s office in June of 1950 and said, ‘North Korea’s attacked South Korea,’ Harry Truman didn’t take a poll. Harry Truman knew what we had to do.”

Actually, according to Chace’s book, Acheson phoned Truman, who was in Missouri, with the news, and it took Truman a full day to decide how to respond. But give McCain a B-minus for improvising an answer that placed Acheson, more or less, in his correct context.

Who would have guessed that Dean Acheson would be a campaign issue
28 years after his death? Luckily, Bush still has a chance to redeem himself on this front. Below is a pop quiz based on the Acheson biography. We invite the Texas governor to take the test (without, of course, looking at the answers that follow). If nothing else, a decent score would put to rest any doubts about Bush’s reading comprehension skills.

Questioners in future debates should feel free to steal from the list that follows, as well.

1) When Acheson was a student at Yale, what was his grade point average?

2) To what was Acheson referring when he said he had visited “one of these mad and not a little degrading spectacles [and] nothing would induce me to do it again”?

3) In 1933, Acheson was appointed undersecretary of the Treasury to serve beneath Treasury Secretary William Woodin. How did Woodin obtain his position? How much banking experience did Woodin have? What did Woodin’s appointment reveal about U.S. politics?

4) After falling out of favor with President Roosevelt, why did Acheson not ally himself with the Republican Party?

5) Of what job did Acheson say, “there is only one test — who can best pilot the ship in … crisis?”

6) According to Chace, what was Acheson’s credo?

a) “I am ready to lead.”

b) “Look at my record.”

c) “Not compromise but decision.”

d) “I want to accomplish something.”

7) When President Harry Truman, 13 days after the death of President Roosevelt, was first informed by Secretary of War Henry Stimson about the secret project to build an atomic bomb, how long did the meeting last?

Whom did McGeorge Bundy, national security advisor to President John F. Kennedy, describe this way: “[He] seldom went beyond the counsel he had to choose from. He was not an initiator but a chooser; the buck stopped here, but he waited for the buck to arrive”? Hint: Keep your eye on the buck.

9) Explain the Bretton Woods agreements. Keep your answer to sound bite length.

10) True or false: When Truman in 1947 issued the Truman Doctrine, a challenge to Communism, and declared “it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures,” he and Acheson meant this literally and intended to stick to these words regarding U.S. actions around the world.

11) Which of the following took the position in 1948 that the “United States has little strategic interest in maintaining the present troops and bases in Korea” and advised Washington to accept Soviet domination of Korea and send aid instead to “countries of greater strategic importance”?

a) the American Communist Party

b) Sen. Prescott Bush

c) Gen. Dwight Eisenhower

d) the New York Times editorial board

12) When confronted with a hard decision — what to say about accused Soviet spy Alger Hiss, whose brother had been a law partner of Acheson — did Acheson rely on advisors and consultants?

13) When Acheson spoke before the American Society of Newspaper Editors in 1950, he decried Sen. Joe McCarthy’s anti-communist witch hunt and concluded his remarks on this subject with the words of poet John Donne: “Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind. And therefore …” Complete the quote Acheson used. (Hint: The lines do not rhyme.)

14. When Acheson briefed President-elect Eisenhower in 1952, what foreign policy problem did he have no solution for?

15) How did Acheson describe President Kennedy’s Bay of Pigs operation against Cuba?

a) “poorly planned”

b) “worth trying”

c) “a bungled toy-soldier campaign mounted by a playboy”

d) “asinine”

16) During the Cuban missile crisis, the Pentagon proposed a strong military response that could have led to an invasion of Cuba. Why did that nearly lead to nuclear war?

17) What lesson of the Korean War did Acheson believe applied to the Vietnam
War?

18) In 1967, Acheson, who was an informal advisor to President Lyndon B. Johnson,
suspected he was not being provided accurate information about the war in
Vietnam, and he stormed out of a White House meeting with the president.
Afterward, a Johnson aide called Acheson and asked why he had left so
abruptly. What was Acheson’s reply?

19) What books did Acheson like to read? You will receive extra credit for drawing lessons applicable to the present from any of them.

1) As Chace writes, “his grades rarely rose above a C average.”

2) Political conventions.

3) Woodin, president of the American Car & Foundry Co., was appointed because he had contributed $10,000 to Franklin Roosevelt’s campaign. He had no banking experience. The appointment showed that in politics, money talks and big-bucks contributors get paybacks from the politicians they fund.

4) Acheson objected to the Republican effort to red-bait FDR’s New Deal by tagging it as communism. “It seems to me utterly fantastic to suggest,” Acheson said, “that Communism is in any manner involved in this campaign. It serves only to arouse spirit of bigotry … I am against any party which inflames this spirit.”

5) The presidency.

6) c) “Not compromise but decision.”

7) Fifteen minutes.

Harry Truman.

9) These international monetary accords, negotiated in 1944 in New Hampshire, established the economic and financial underpinnings of the postwar world and set up the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.

10) False. Acheson shortly thereafter said the Truman administration was not committed to “an ideological crusade” everywhere around the world. Years later, he explained that in the early days of the Cold War such rhetoric was necessary because it was “clearer than the truth.”

11) b) Eisenhower. Four years later, when Eisenhower was the Republican presidential nominee, Eisenhower opportunistically blasted Acheson and the Truman administration for inviting the attack on South Korea by putting it outside “America’s so-called defensive perimeter.”

12) No. He later said, “I felt that advisors were of no use and so consulted none. I understood that I had responsibilities above and beyond my own desires.” When asked about Alger Hiss, Acheson referred to a New Testament passage calling for compassion and said, “I do not intend to turn my back on Alger Hiss.” He was vilified by political foes for this.

13) “… never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.”

14) Vietnam. At the time the French were trying to quell a
nationalist-communist movement there, and Acheson didn’t believe the French could succeed.

15) d. “asinine.” He thought Kennedy’s obsession with Castro’s Cuba was, Chace writes, “a distraction from the central strategic concerns of the United States.”

16) The United States didn’t know that Soviet troops stationed in Cuba possessed tactical nuclear weapons and were authorized to use them should the Americans invade. The presence of these weapons were not disclosed until 1993.

17) Distrust the predictions of the U.S. military.

18) “You can tell the president — and you can tell him in precisely these words — that he can take Vietnam and stick it up his ass.”

19) Biographies of statesmen, such as Benjamin Disraeli. Fiction by Tobias Smollett and Charles Dickens. Books on the Civil War. And Thucydides’ “Peloponnesian War.”