Jonah already excerpted Camille Paglia’s take on the media and the Mark Foley scandal, but I wanted to highlight a few more media-related comments from her interview with Salon. To wit:

I thought that Bill[ Clinton]‘s recent performance on Fox News was very ill-advised. I know many Democrats loved it: “Oh, finally someone going toe-to-toe with Fox!” Well, what is this shibboleth about Fox as some sort of satanic force in American politics? Get over it!
It came at a time when Fox’s ratings numbers have finally cooled off a little bit. It seemed more calculated.
It may have been mixed. It began as a challenge to the right-wing media, but I think Clinton got out of control and went embarrassingly too far. It was a perfectly civil and reasonable question from one of Fox’s most neutral commentators. But Clinton went off on a tirade, waved his finger in Chris Wallace’s face, and accused him of sitting there with a “smirk.” That was over-personalizing the interview by any standard. And to charge Wallace with setting his guest up, with ambush journalism — good heavens, the problem with American journalism is hardly that it’s too severe and punitive. Our reporters’ questioning of politicians is pallid and wimpy compared to what goes on in Britain and Europe. BBC journalists jump right in the face of every political figure from the prime minister on down. So for Clinton to make a huge fuss about a mild question about his administration’s record in dealing with Osama bin Laden was a bullying of our journalists — an act of war, in fact, on American journalists, saying, “Don’t you dare go off our agreed-to list of questions!” Every Democrat who was disgusted by the American media’s cowering passivity leading up to the Iraq war should have gone red-hot over this episode and said, “Clinton, back off! We want journalists to be bolder, ruder in challenging authority. Put more spine into our reporters!”
This overblown fear of Fox News is such a sentimentality on the part of too many Democrats. Talk radio is infinitely more powerful than Fox. Radio hosts are blanketing the country with round-the-clock conservative ideology — not because they’re dastardly conspirators manipulating the media but because they’ve achieved their success, market by market, in creating programs that millions of people want to listen to. The recent filing for bankruptcy by Air America dramatizes my party’s abject failure to produce shows that are informative and entertaining and that systematically build an audience — the way all the top radio hosts did who climbed the ladder from obscurity to their present prominence. Aren’t we the party of Hollywood? The fact that we’ve failed so miserably at this central medium of communication shows how something has gone very wrong in Democratic sensibility.

Paglia has lots to say about that “something,” and plenty of criticism for Republicans too in this fascinating, wide-ranging interview.