As if in answer to a call for “comic relief” from the horrors of the Haitian earthquake, the new bestseller Game Change, has arrived to something better than “rave reviews” -- a “mainstream” media eager to Xerox its every page. And no wonder. For while its ostensible subject is big-time politics, this “insider” expose of the 2008 Presidential race is really about the fourth estate. For its authors, Time's Mark Halperin and New York Magazine's John Heinemann offer a mother lode of the estate’s most valued commodity -- pure, unadulterated gossip.

As critic Hendrik Herzberg notes in The New Yorker, Halperin and Heinemann “write that every one of their interviews—“more than three hundred,” with “more than two hundred” people—was conducted on “deep background,” meaning that they “agreed not to identify the subjects as sources in any way.” And the result is 464 pages of material with little in the way of “sourcing.” For today’s “mainstream” journalists have long tossed aside the rules of the past. Today a lack of attribution is proof of seriousness because it provides, what Herzberg cites in the book’s portrait of John and Elizabeth Edwards “the ugliest details—of his narcissism, her rage, their heedlessness.”

In other words, all the good stuff.

“To be sure,” Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz notes, the book‘s authors “had the advantage of reconstructing the events after the fact, aided by operatives who were given a cloak of anonymity to dish and perhaps settle scores.” The “perhaps” is most amusing. For as anyone who has been paying attention to what’s been going on with “The Beltway’ over the last few decades, with “scandals” ranging from “Whitewater” to the Irving “Scooter” Libby trial, right down to the social-climbing, party-crashing Salahi’s it’s clear that “gotcha” overtook “scoop” long ago.

Still, albeit inadvertently, something more serious comes into play as well. For while Game Change makes sport of Republican Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin’s ignorance as to why Korea was divided into a North and a South, can they say most Americans are any better informed? Of course not. Halperin and Heinemann can no more explain why the Bush administration found an ever-credulous media eager to believe its insistence that an invasion of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was undertaken in answer to the attacks of 9/11? There’s no future in journalists telling the public what they don’t already know. Dare to search for anything of import and risk offending those all-powerful unnamed sources. Rather the “Mainstream” sticks to the “back fence.“ Haiti like Hurriane Katrina before it is worth an image or two only. When it comes to words its safer to stick to trivia -- like Beltway hostess and Washington Post columnist Sally Quinn’s demand that the Obamas fire their social secretary for the unspeakable crime of nearly accommodating the terminally silly Salahis. Speaking of this in both print and on television with the sort of alarm others have reserved for the erstwhile underpants bomber, Quinn nothing if not typical of fourth estate thinking on its highest level.

How did the estate reach this estate? That’s easily discovered if one turns to Ezra Goodman’s seminal, invaluable The Fifty Year Decline and Fall of Hollywood . For while it was written in 1961 about the movie business, the press and politics is its true subject.

“Hollywood is narcissistically sensitive about the printed word,“ Goodman observes. “As a result, the Hollywood press has become something more than a press corps. It is an integral part of the social and business life of the community. The Hollywood press does not merely chronicle the show. It is part of the show itself.” Truer

Words couldn’t describe what we have today in print or pixels or on the tube. For just like Hedda and Louella before them Halperin and Heilmann are entertainers disguised as reporters. And as show business is, as actor Martin Mull so sagely observed is “High School with money,” so Politics -- a species of show business featuring the less good-looking and well-dressed -- is Community College with a more generous allowance.

And yes, I wish this were just a joke.