The obsession of the news media with the Monica Lewinsky affair, in addition to other recent scandals -- the forgeries by Stephen Glass of The New Republic , the CNN nerve gas hoax -- have focused attention on the shortcomings of the mass media. While criticism is in order, it should be remembered that there are domains of public discourse other than journalism that also suffer from chronic institutional pathologies. American intellectual life at the end of the twentieth century is divided, like Caesar's Gaul, into three parts: the academy, the media, and the realm of the partisan think tank.

The land of academe resembles a sclerotic European welfare state, in which excessive regulation protects lazy bureaucrats and pampered union members, while freezing out an ever-growing pool of the resentful unemployed. The proliferation of scholarly disciplines since the nineteenth century has usually been the result, not of the advancement of knowledge, but of attempts by professors to protect themselves from economic competition. High barriers to entry (like making tenure depend on Ph.D. and refereed publication) keep wages up by keeping the labor pool limited. At the same time, rigid specialization by the tenured members of the academic guild presents a versatile genius from dominating a number of subjects in the humanities or natural sciences. An American equivalent of Max Weber might be allowed to write about the history of religion or constitutional politics or ethical philosophy -- but if he tried to write about all three, he would find himself persona non grata in the academic world, and quite possible unemployable.

Just as European welfare states protect the employed and unionized at the expense of huge numbers of unorganized job-seekers, so the American academic guild system has generated a surplus of graduate students and professors who cannot find employment commensurate with their skills (or at least commensurate with their credentials). The result is a growing proletariat of lecturers, adjunct professors and grad-student teaching assistants who do most of the work on campus. Freed from onerous labor, the tenured few concentrate on making their disciplines even less accessible to the untenured hordes -- and even less intelligible to potential rivals in other departments.

It should be a cause of concern, therefore, that the majority of today's prestige novelist and poets make their livings as academics. A minority are tenured in literature departments at prestigious universities; a much greater number are goliards, rambling from this campus writing program to that. The dependence of our literati on the academy is disguised by an interesting convention that implicitly delegitimates all writers outside of universities. A business executive or a journalist who publishes poetry or fiction is usually identified as a business executive or journalist, albeit one with literary interests. However, a professor of literature who writes fiction or poetry is not a professor, but a "novelist" or a "poet."

One need not be an economic determinist to predict that professor-poets and professor-novelists will write a different kind of poetry and fiction than the writers in the past who earned their keep as hard-scrabble journalists, provincial clergy or royal courtiers. The danger of specialization, the deformation professionnelle of the academic writer, was recently brought home to me in a conversation with the graduate of an Ivy League undergraduate writing program. She told me, to my horror, that students in their freshman year were required to choose between the Fiction track, the Nonfiction track, and the Poetry track. "What if you choose the Fiction track, but decide you want to write a sonnet in your junior year?" I asked. "That kind of thing is discouraged," she replied. "It's hard to get into a good graduate writing program if it looks like you're all over the map."

If the American academy is a bureaucratic Nordic or Central European welfare state, the American media realm resembles a Central American or Caribbean banana republic. Almost everything is owned by a few families of obscenely rich absentee landlords (the publishers) who rely on subservient and ruthless overseers (the editors) to discipline the unorganized workers in the sweatshops and plantations (the "content" providers," formerly known as writers).

The intellectual plantation economy, long the norm in Hollywood, is becoming the norm in all areas of magazine and book publishing, thanks to the merger of the mass media. Already literary novelists are as obscure as screenwriters, compared to big-name agents and editors, who are becoming the equivalent of producer-directors. Before long high-rolling celebrity editors may start taking credit for books, with the name of the actual author in small print in the acknowledgements, the way the screenwriter's name is buried in the scrolling credits.

Everyone in journalism has his or her own horror story about the publishers. Often these revolve around the dreaded FOP (Friend of the Publisher), who has been promised space in the magazine or newspaper by the owner. Sometimes the FOP is a Guest Editor. Tina Brown turned over an issue of The New Yorker to Guest Editor Roseanne Barr.

In the Media Republic, as in all Third World countries, the angry mob turns on the front-line solders (the reporters), rather than on the powers whom they serve. The public is right to think that the mass media are obsessed with subjects like the O.J. Trial and l'affaire Lewinsky and the death of Princess Di -- but wrong to blame the correspondents, who after all, are only carrying out orders. The truth is that many journalists and pundits would rather examine important but neglected subjects. It is the editors and producers and publishers who play up the scandals, on the correct calculation that this strategy boosts readership or viewership. The editor of one of the nation's leading opinion pages told me that she had been pointedly reminded by her newspaper's business department that circulation spiked whenever an Op-Ed about Monicagate appeared -- and went south at the mention of the Asian financial crisis. Another newspaper editor recently turned down an Op-Ed about foreign policy he had commissioned from me, explaining sadly that his bosses "want All Monica All the Time."

The third country of the American mind, the partisan think tank network centered in Washington, D.C., resembles nothing so much as a totalitarian state like North Korea. Think tanks may look like universities or research institutes, "little magazines" may resemble scholarly journals, but they are really mere fronts in a cultural apparatus that is kept strictly subordinated to the goals of a political party or an ideological faction.

In the Media Republic, the overseers seek publicity; in Thinktankia, the apparatchiks seek ideological uniformity. Every word, every thought is supposed to repay the foundation subsidy or corporate grant by promoting the Revolution -- be it the Social Democratic Revolution or the Reagan Revolution. In the apocalyptic struggle, words and ideas are weapons, and truth must be sacrificed to the Revolution's success. The people who run ideological journals and think tanks usually have the souls of commissars (not least the "libertarians"). Naturally, like and totalitarian state, the partisan think tank network is riddled by conspiracies and periodically shaken up by show trials of dissidents and sudden coups against leaders. (The purges in the think tank world are about principle; those in the media world, about profit; and those in the academic world, about prestige).

Book publishing in fin-de-siecle America is not so much a sovereign state in its own right as a war-torn country occupied and divided into spheres of influence by external powers -- rather like China in the last century. For example, many of the public policy potboilers in recent years, like Dinesh D'Souza's Illiberal Education and Charles Murray's The Bell Curve , have been subsidized by ideological think tanks (usually on the right).

Most prestige fiction and poetry exists in the university's zone of occupation. Many of the books that win prizes and good reviews in the right venues are read by few people, but that hardly matters, as they are designed to go directly from the publisher to the classroom, after the briefest of decent intervals in the bookstore. A similar trend has manifested itself in the visual arts, now that many museums, by commissioning "installations," have rendered the private patron unnecessary.

The logical successor to the campus-oriented book that nobody reads is the academic book that nobody writes. Most of my professor friends plead guilty to the practice of stealing footnotes from other academics and using them without having read the cited texts. I am sure it is only a matter of time before some academic writer invents the Virtual Book -- a book that exists only as a footnote. The virtual author, who is too busy to write the book, will be paired with the virtual reader, who is too busy to read it. The invention of virtual literature would spare everyone time and effort, while leaving the factories of reputation and scholarship in the academic-industrial complex virtually unchanged.

Nearby in the partitioned territory of book publishing, the zone occupied by the media provides a haven for quite different kinds of books. Already the typical work of commercial fiction is, in the words of a New York trade editor I know, a "pre-screenplay." In nonfiction, synergy is maximized when the same story or idea can appear, more or less simultaneously, as a magazine article, a book, and a motion picture. A quote from former New Yorker editor Tina Brown about Harvey Weinstein of Miramax defies parody: "I feel that the kinds of movies he makes are the kind of journalism we try to do." Soon journalists may be evaluated by how much they contribute to selling the plastic toys in McDonald's Happy Meals that are timed to coincide with synergistic movie-TV-book-magazine Events.

The No-Man's-Land in book publishing between the media and academic zones is home to the memoir -- a tabloid genre that passes itself off as high art. Once upon a time, writers wrote stories and novels about people unlike themselves. Then, for a generation or two, they were told to write about people resembling themselves. Finally, by the 1990s, agents and editors were encouraging young writers to drop fiction altogether and write about the subject dearest to their hearts, themselves. This has helped not only those few writers who are fortunate (or accursed) enough to have personal lives that are stranger than fiction, but also those whose lives are fiction -- like Bruno Doesseker, a.k.a. Binjamin Wilkomorski, a Swiss author who fabricated his identity as a Holocaust survivor. It appears that the trend in trade publishing has almost come full circle -- from fiction to memoir-as-fiction to memoir to fiction-as-memoir.

A number of recent hoaxes in journalism as well as book publishing make one wonder whether something is in the air (or maybe in the ink). In all of the chin-stroking about Stephen Glass, The New Republic reporter who hoaxed his editors and readers for months, nobody singled out the essential factor -- the growing importance, in journalism, of what might be called green-diaper babies.

Following the logic of the sweatshop/plantation economy, leading journals of opinion increasingly tend to recruit their midlevel editors from the pool of unpaid or under-paid interns, who have already proven that they have independent means. When challenged, publishers and editors will say that paying full-time living wages plus benefits to middle-class magazine and publishing workers is just not feasible (the same argument from necessity has been made throughout history by the employers of scabs, illegal aliens, children, convicts, coolies, and slaves). Because only the offspring of the wealthiest two or three percent of the U.S. population can afford an unpaid or poorly-paid internship in Manhattan, Washington, D.C. or San Francisco, the talent pool for the next generation of magazine editors and writers is in danger of being reduced to green-diaper babies. Talented young Americans in their twenties and early thirties who lack gilt-edged parents, trust funds or compliant working spouses find it almost impossible to get a foot on the lowest rungs of the ladder in editing and publishing. The low wages alone explain why the New York/Washington publishing world is one of the most exclusive social clubs in the United States. There are hardly any blacks or Hispanics in elite journalism, but then for that matter there are hardly and white working-class Catholics or white middle-class Baptists. Publishing is segregated by race because it is segregated by class.

For economic reasons, then, today's young journalist is more likely to resemble a character out of the works of F. Scott Fitzgerald rather than one out of the works of Ben Hecht. Increasingly, American journalism is becoming the career of choice for the fresh-out-of-college overclass twit. This, by the way, explains the success of the disproportionate numbers of British expats in American journalism. If France and Russia share credit for the notion of the intelligentsia, we have Britain to thank for the Twiterati. The characteristics of the micro-elite from which new journalists and editors are recruited go a long way toward explaining the biases that warp American media coverage of... America. One of those biases is the grossly disproportionate focus on the Northeast (and to a lesser extent the metropolitan West Coast). More Americans live in the South and West than in the North and East, but unless there are fires, tornados or floods, you will search in vain for news of the heartland or the Gulf Coast. Another bias is the media's neglect of entire classes, in particular the white working class and the white rural poor, about whom the media elite has derived most of its scant knowledge from "Deliverance" and "The Beverly Hillbillies." A third bias is the illusion purveyed by the media that American society is divided between the three strata most familiar to the green-diaper babies of our Fourth Estate: namely, the college-educated white overclass, the working poor (largely immigrant), whom the overclass employs, and the urban poor (largely black) whom the overclass fears and tries to avoid.

Green-diaper babies in journalism in their early or mid-twenties, if only because of their age, lack scholarly expertise and they also lack personal experience in politics, business, science, the arts, or any other field of endeavor. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that tyro journalists, given great amounts of space in magazines and newspapers to fill, are tempted to color them in with the crayons of their imaginations—as The New Republic learned the hard way. When The New Republic peaked in the 1980s, long before my own brief stint as a senior editor, most of the writing was done by experienced, well-paid adults from diverse backgrounds like Charles Krauthammer, Morton Kondracke and Fred Barnes. In recent years, however, a growing number of pages in the magazine have been filled by recent college graduates, most of them from Harvard, who can afford to work for next to nothing. You get what you pay for, and The New Republic got Stephen Glass.

In my own career I have fled the boring welfare state of the university for the tyrannical party-state of the think-tank world, escaping, before I could be purged, to the corrupt and easy-going banana republic of journalism. On the basis of my experience, I believe that the differences in style among thinkers and writers in academe, the media and the think tanks reflect different institutional constraints and, especially, different economic incentives.

The greatest contrast is that found between inhabitants of the academic country, on the one hand, and the citizens of the media and think tank realms, on the other. Journalists and think-tank ideologues still write in English, whereas all successful academics, except for a few noble relics like Samuel P. Huntington and Richard Rorty, write in the post-English patois of their fields. Where possible, campus guilds have abandoned language altogether for numbers. Almost all of the significant concepts of economics can be expressed verbally, or with the use of diagrams. The triumph of mathematical economics, with its cargo-cult imitation of physics, can be explained only by the bureaucratic imperatives of the American economics professoriate. For some time, political science has been mimicking economics, by attempting to "model" the messy gang warfare that is international and domestic politics with the aid of "game theory" and "rational choice theory" (known fondly among its detractors as Rat Choice). Obscurantist methodologies have the great advantage of concealing from outsiders the banality of thinking in any discipline by which they are adopted. If you have nothing intelligent to say, you would be a fool to say it plainly.

Journalists and ideologues, as I have noted, must still write in intelligible English for non-specialist readers. It is therefore no surprise that the topics of American public discourse in recent years have usually been set either by intellectual journalists (James Fallows, Robert Kaplan or Nicholas Lemann) or scholarly generalists based in one or another think tank or public policy school (Robert Reich, Charles Murray). Their potential rivals, the professors, have obtained job security at the price of irrelevance.

Although the take-over of the universities by dozens of self-protective guilds has forced many first-rate thinkers across the borders into the media's Third World sweatshops or this or that ideological Republic of Virtue, the émigrés find life in their new countries uncertain and insecure. You might expect that the think tanks would provide better homes for American intellectuals than our pedantic universities and our oligarchic media. Unfortunately, the economic incentive structure of the partisan think tank discourages freedom of thought. Because the typical think-tank ideologue must get his grant renewed annually, it would be suicidal for him to challenge the party line that is set by the corporate and foundation program officers and their middlemen, the think-tank executives. A scholar who lasts forever at a place like AEI, Gato, or IPS tends to have an eye on the poster wall, a finger to the wind, and an ear to the ground (yes, it's as painful as playing Twister). In theory, university professors with life tenure are in a far better position than think-tankers to challenge conventional wisdom. However, as we have seen, America's dons are too busy bricking themselves in with unreadable tomes to waste time on the thankless task of speaking truth to power in the public square.

Does the Balkanization of the American mind matter? The country can function and perhaps even flourish in spite of absurd professors, superficial preppie journalists and monomaniacal ideologues muttering in their sleep about the flat tax or the progressive tax. However, in the absence of generalist thinkers writing for a general audience, there is a danger that public policy will be monopolized by specialists who serve particular lobbies. Defense policy will be made and discussed only by members of the military-industrial mafia; interest rate policy by bankers and their representatives; labor policy by business and union lobbyists; religious policy by religious fanatics (and anti-religion fanatics). As we have seen, even the humanities can suffer, if the artistic and scholarly communities are captured by the equivalent of producer lobbies.

It is easy to identify three reforms that could unify and revitalize the three separated countries of the American mind: the abolition of tenure; outlawing unpaid and poorly-paid journalistic internships; and mandating that think-tank scholars be hired for extended periods (say five to ten years). Abolishing tenure would weaken the campus guilds by permitting non-guild intellectuals to replace the deadwood at major universities. Outlawing unpaid and poorly-paid journalistic internships, and mandating that all magazines and publishing employees by paid full-time, adult, middle-class salaries with generous benefits, would shift the average age of magazine workers upward, while moving their average socio-economic origins downward from the hereditary overclass toward the center of gravity of the educated middle class. (If a decent-pay requirement drives a few journalistic sweatshops into bankruptcy, well, progress has a price). Finally, extended contracts for think-tank scholars would give them a little more independence from result-oriented donors, without encouraging monastic vices like sloth and acedia the way that life tenure for professors has done.

Will these reforms be enacted? No. Will they even be widely discussed? No. Therefore American intellectual life, for the foreseeable future, will continue to be partitioned between the country of the pedant, the country of the twit, and the country of the commissar.