There is no sense in restating what nearly everyone already has said about the case of Chandra Levy, the young California woman who disappeared in Washington two months ago, and how her friend, Rep. Gary Condit, should come clean. But on the question of Rep. Condit’s private life and the effect of the media’s zealous reporting of it, Tom Rosenstiel, executive director of The Project for Excellence in Journalism, recently offered this provoking thought in The New York Times:

“The real impact is not that there’s no such thing as something that is private,” he said. “It’s that there’s no such thing as public. What used to be private fill our public space. What used to be the subject of our public sphere is pushed out.”

CBS Evening News, which is conspicuously ignoring the story, seems to have understood the danger of favoring gossip over stories of true public benefit. The pain the Levy family is enduring is in no way diminished by observing that the romance between manipulating media and eager public exists in this case not because of a missing person but because of illicit sex or merely the possibility of illicit sex. Once the sex story is over and the more important stories missed, however, there’s less respect on both sides.