Media complex.

When the going gets rough, a few of Clinton's friends in the media really get going. Why?

The Clinton aides who have engaged in such transparently dishonest spin on the talk shows have an excuse: It's their job. But what explains the First Couple's apologists in the Fourth Estate? It's their career. Consider Eleanor Clift. She has spent so long playing the naive, robotic Democratic loyalist on The McLaughlin Group, it's difficult for her to approach politics in any other way. And if she did, it would risk ruining her brand-name recognition.

The explosion of McLaughlin-style "debate" TV shows means there is a steady demand for predictable liberals. MSNBC got the entire White House line on the Lewinsky affair the very first night of Sexgate by airing Miss Clift: "I think now we are in for an examination of this young woman and her background to test her credibility.... Linda Tripp is also the link with another woman who allegedly said in a deposition that the President made improper advances. So you begin to wonder what her role is."

Miss Clift was ready to defend as well as counterattack. President Clinton has "been elected twice with people knowing that he has had affairs.... I think past Presidents, Lyndon Johnson for one, certainly Jack Kennedy, these things went on." She went on to suggest that Ken Starr's probe is somehow a threat to abortion rights.

Wall Street Journal columnist and Capital Gang panelist Al Hunt moved as fast as Eleanor Clift, although Hunt is less concerned with ideology than with self-promotion.

Nearly every Hunt column and TV appearance has the same subtext: This man is Connected, an Insider, a Player. Thus, he noted in the Journal column he wrote the first night of the scandal (as well as in three TV appearances that first week) that he is close to Vernon Jordan.

Ergo, according to Hunt, the suborning-perjury charge "simply doesn't ring true. The President has demonstrated that he's too shrewd to get caught in such a trap. And yesterday, even some Washingtonians who felt the story could be the end of this President didn't believe the published charge against Mr. Jordan, an exceedingly careful and cautious lawyer. (Mr. Jordan, a director of Dow Jones, which publishes [the Journal], is a longtime friend; I am convinced the allegations against him are false.)"

Note that Hunt clears the President delicately, without reminding us that the proof of his shrewdness was the way--captured on another set of tape recordings--he coached Gennifer Flowers to deny another set of "allegations" without ever telling her outright to lie. Jordan's reputation, by contrast, is understood to speak for itself.

Hunt's own self-granted status as upright insider allows him to carry White House water. Consider this passage: "The critical question ... is what Ms. Lewinsky does and says in the days ahead. Earlier, in a written statement, she denied that she had ever had a sexual relationship with the President." Hunt then continues: "If [she] sticks to her initial account, the whole matter likely will dissolve.... Mr. Starr may try to pressure her, with the tapes as leverage, but this could be dangerous ground for the controversial independent counsel."

To paraphrase: Monica, lie; it's your safest bet. Trust me, I know. (Above all, admire me as someone who knows.)

And note Hunt's own lie-by-implication. After all, Miss Lewinsky's true initial account is one taped by Linda Tripp, in which the ex-intern agonized over whether to produce the affidavit that Mr. Hunt prefers to treat as her original story.

Eleanor Clift and Al Hunt made it their business to defend the President effectively, in contrast to a few embalmed-liberal journalists such as Lars-Erik Nelson, who explicitly took Clinton's side at the start. But even Nelson had to give a nod to the implications of the Lewinsky tapes. And some Clinton defenders actually jumped ship.

Take Jacob Weisberg, now chief political correspondent for the online journal Slate. He has love-bombed the Clinton White House for years with what is meant to be an iconoclastic twist--anti-anti-Clintonism, if you will. His specialty is arguing a plainly absurd thesis, as in his 1994 New York story, "Why Bill Clinton Is a Great American President / No, Really."

In his last pre-Sexgate column, "No Respect: Why the Washington Establishment Hates Bill Clinton," Weisberg gives half a dozen reasons for anti-Clinton animus before settling on the real one: the President snubbed the Georgetown social elite after 1992. This is meant to be a thesis counterintuitive, knowing, and shrewd.

What about the more obvious explanation for the contempt for Clinton, his glaring ethical flaws? Mr. Weisberg brushes them off: "What President or successful politician has never acted expediently by dissembling, dropping old friends, and compromising his ethics at various points?"

But exactly a week later, in a post-Monica piece, Weisberg argued that Clinton would have to go, precisely because of his dissembling and compromised ethics. The revelations had left Clinton so rich a target for irony that the usual anti-anti schtick would have seemed forced even for Weisberg.

The tides of scandal rise and ebb, of course. Miss Clift and Mr. Hunt weren't sounding so embattled in the wake of the State of the Union message. Soon enough Jacob Weisberg will probably be back at their side, attacking the Clinton attackers. And all will be right again in the media world.

Mr. Cunningham, a former NR articles editor, is Associate Editorial Page Editor at the New York Post.