IT MIGHT NOT have passed muster with the Project for Excellence in Journalism, but Mickey Kaus said what everyone was thinking in his Slate dispatch last Thursday: "Gary Condit may well be cleared of the Chandra Levy murder — that would be intensely disappointing, but it’s possible." And he followed up with some wanton speculation as to why the location where she was found suggests that she was not out jogging, as Condit defenders want us to presume. "That’s a 7 or 8-mile jog, round trip.... Was Levy training for a marathon? Most joggers fall into the 2-5 mile camp, no?"

In a similar vein, Greta Van Susteren popped up on her Fox News colleague Bill O’Reilly’s radio show last Thursday to talk about why Levy couldn’t have possibly been out getting some exercise. "You don’t jog in this area," she told him. "There’s not a jogging path in this area." O’Reilly agreed: "I’m not buying into this jogging thing. It’s too far from her house." Van Susteren said she thought the eight-mile distance practically proved Levy wasn’t out jogging, although she added that "maybe it’s because I’m a slug." O’Reilly, describing the area where Levy’s body was found, said that "when you’re trying to hide a body, you look for a place that’s inaccessible."

Without a hint of self-awareness, O’Reilly then opened the lines to callers with this warning: "I don’t want to hear any theories or speculation, because that doesn’t get us anywhere."

Is this responsible journalism? Well, no. But it’s emblematic of our modern media culture, where there’s no monolithic agreement on standards because different media require different standards. The police have never identified Gary Condit as a suspect, but they haven’t ruled him out, either. It is perfectly fair and true to say that he might have killed Levy, and that his behavior was so reprehensible that he has called suspicion onto himself. How this — the information and the speculation — is handled by Mickey Kaus, Bill O’Reilly, and Greta Van Susteren is totally different from how it is handled by the New York Times and the Washington Post or, for that matter, by Dan Rather, Peter Jennings, and Tom Brokaw.

Maybe what’s most striking about the way the media have covered the Chandra story is not the moments of excess, but the self-flagellation that accompanies each outbreak of tabloid exuberance. As Julian Borger wrote last summer in London’s Guardian, "The reason this young woman’s disappearance is being given so much coverage is because she had an affair with a politician. But is a sexual relationship between two adults, even if it involves adultery, the business of media? Of course the answer to this question in the British press would be a resounding yes. Scandal drives sales, and that pretty much drives the argument in the highly competitive world of British newspapers. Perhaps the US press is more reflective and takes its role more seriously, or perhaps the lack of serious competition faced by the major city newspapers means that they can afford such navel-gazing."

Last summer, in a piece for an online publication called the Albion Monitor, the Nation’s Washington editor, David Corn, lamented the media’s obsession with Chandra. "There is a rough hierarchy to how much of the media — particularly broadcast media — rates newsworthiness," he wrote. "In descending and simplistic order: people, politics and policy."

That’s right. But Corn’s complaint was not that Condit’s role in Levy’s disappearance wasn’t a story, but that the cable news channels and the tabloid press were covering it to the exclusion of almost everything else. His idea of more-worthy stories: the patients’ bill of rights, campaign-finance reform, the stem-cell debate, and a battle between the NAACP and the White House, among other things.

Yet the quality media are filled with such stories. Rather than complaining that important issues aren’t getting coverage, Corn seems disgruntled that CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC aren’t shoving them down the throats of viewers who don’t care about them. So what? The combined circulation of the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal is greater than the average combined viewership of the three cable news channels. National Public Radio covers the issues — and has some of the highest ratings on radio. And yes, it’s sad what’s happened to the Big Three newscasts, but anyone who doesn’t like them can switch over to The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer — that is, if they can stand a show that equates "serious" with "dull enough to induce unconsciousness."

By Sunday, Chandra mania was already dying down. What more is there to say? If police interview Condit again, it will heat up — and it should. If Condit is arrested, all hell will break loose — and it should.

I started this piece by parroting the conventional wisdom that Chandra mania was a low moment for the media. And there were times that it was. But with the exception of cable-news obsessives, the vast majority of Americans learned pretty much what they should have learned: that a sleazy congressman had been caught up in the disappearance of an intern he’d been boinking, and that he’d lied to police about some details that might have helped their investigation.

If the public learned more about that than it did about the Bush administration’s efforts to scuttle international arms-control agreements, well, in a perfect world I suppose I should get worked up about it. But this isn’t a perfect world.

Besides, I want to know what happened to Chandra Levy, damn it.

Dan Kennedy can be reached at dan@dankennedy.net