BOB GARFIELD: From WNYC in New York, this is NPR's On the Media. I'm Bob Garfield.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: And I'm Brooke Gladstone, and this is President Bush.

PRESIDENT GEORGE BUSH: Anybody who is - who's in a position to serve this country ought to understand the consequences of words.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: My, oh, my. We didn't weigh in when the President changed the rhetorical direction of his war policy by declaring that he'd, quote, "never been stay the course." We didn't comment when Vice President Cheney appeared to liken waterboarding to a dunk in the water. Mostly, we cover the media, and mostly, the media chewed on those howlers for a time and then gulped them down in due course. But the media can't stop masticating on this latest liberal gaffe like a Washington Monument-sized Snausage.

SENATOR JOHN KERRY: It was a botched joke about the president.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Senator John Kerry meant to say that if you didn't study, if you were intellectually lazy, you could get us stuck in Iraq, but he screwed it up and left out the word "us." White House Press Secretary Tony Snow just couldn't figure that out. TONY SNOW: Where does "us" fit in? You don't "us get" stuck? I don't understand. I mean, it just, it doesn't scan here. [OFF-MIKE COMMENTS]

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Not "us get," Tony, "get us." It's not that hard. But leaving out the "us," said Snow, said the President, said Limbaugh, made it sound like Kerry was insulting the troops, not the President, and that's not funny. Now, it's true Kerry is famously humorless. He should never tell a joke. Vice President Cheney, on the other hand, he's a funny guy.

VICE PRESIDENT CHENEY: Of course, Senator Kerry said he was just making a joke, and he botched it up. [CROWD RESPONSE] I guess we didn't get that nuance. [LAUGHTER] Actually, he was for the joke before he was against it. [LAUGHTER]

BROOKE GLADSTONE: But if Cheney was enjoying himself, so were the media. According to TVEyes.com, Kerry's name was mentioned on cable news 715 times in just thirty-six hours. It's a genuine campaign freak show, a phenomenon explored and deplored in the book called The Way to Win: Taking the White House in 2008, by ABC's Mark Halperin and John Harris, national politics editor of The Washington Post. Harris said that he resisted the story at first.

JOHN HARRIS: My first instinct about this to be somewhat restrained in our coverage. I actually argued it off the front page. I felt that it was kind of a distraction. I don't think the question of what Kerry said is central in the minds of most voters. I thought it was being promoted for partisan purposes. So we put the story on the inside page. It was a complete and a responsible story, but not a highly-played one the first day. The second day, President Bush was talking about it [LAUGHS]; Vice President Cheney was talking about it. Everyone was talking about it. I really was in no position to resist that. The story ended up leading the paper.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: So Thursday you ran it as your lead story of the day, under the headline "Kerry Offers Apology to Troops." Is there anything substantive going on here? I mean, is this just pure noise?

JOHN HARRIS: It's heavily noise, but it's not my job as an editor to delete the noise or pretend that it doesn't exist. Probably George W. Bush's drunk-driving incident from 1977 wasn't the most important issue facing the country in the closing days of the 2000 campaign. Nonetheless, that was also something that entered the media echo chamber. I think the individual journalists like me are always in a quandary in that we don't run the echo chamber collectively. We only run our part of it.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: But you do suggest that this is a bit of a feeding frenzy by the media that often occurs in the final throes of campaigns. Do you think that this story would have been played as big a few weeks ago?

JOHN HARRIS: I think that it probably would have had a 72-hour trip through the spin cycle. It's just that these 72 hours are probably more critical than the 72 hours of a few weeks ago. The cable news networks were obviously delighted. Here is some content to keep a running story alive. It is being treated like it's the biggest thing facing the country right now. Emphatically, it is not.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: But what it is, I think you would agree, is, according to your own definition, a classic campaign freak show.

JOHN HARRIS: The "freak show" is a term that we use to describe extreme rhetoric, flamboyant attacks, a brand of debate which is not really even aimed at illuminating an issue, much less resolving it, but branding your opponent as fundamentally unacceptable and unworthy and beyond consideration.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Isn't the point of every freak show to depict the candidate as a phony?

JOHN HARRIS: That's one of the most consistent themes. John Kerry was a victim of the freak show, Al Gore was a victim of the freak show, in that they allowed the opposition, in concert with media allies, to tell the story on the opposition's terms, and in the process of that, they completely lost control of their public story and their public image.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: But why is this freak show happening now around John Kerry? He's not even running.

JOHN HARRIS: Brooke, the word I think that's central is "incentives." The people at the White House and in the Republican Party claiming to be offended by this and saddened by this, of course [LAUGHS] weren't offended and saddened. They were delighted. They thought they had a great opportunity to make the election about John Kerry.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: He's an easy target, like shooting fish in a barrel.

JOHN HARRIS: Yeah. In The Way to Win the metaphor we use is actually a little bit more raw than that- he's like clubbing a harp seal on the ice.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: [LAUGHS]

JOHN HARRIS: And that is what they did to him in 2004, and [LAUGHS] that is what they would like to do and have done to him in 2006.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: But by covering every back-and-forth bicker over this misplaced pronoun in Kerry's joke, aren't you playing right into the Administration's hands? And don't you think there is a role that discretion can play in how the story is placed and where it's placed?

JOHN HARRIS: Yes, I think both those things. We can cover a story, we hope, with skepticism, by trying to illuminate what the motives of various political actors are. I don't want there to be any ambiguity. This is not the world as it should be. Unfortunately, it is the world as it is. The freak show, we try to describe it clinically in the book, but we're not neutral about it. We're [LAUGHS] roundly opposed to it. It is a corruption of our democracy.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: But you're the national political editor of The Washington Post. And I don't mean to keep hammering on you, John, but if you are that opposed to it, if you find the freak show so reprehensible, you could take the Kerry story apologizing to troops, and just tuck it inside.

JOHN HARRIS: Brooke, I tried that for one day and, indeed, that is what we did. I cannot, by proclamation, create my own reality and say that this was not, in fact, a dominant reality of the closing days of the campaign. And my first responsibility to readers is to describe that reality. Now, I don't think, if you look at The Post stories, that we covered them in a freak show way. I believe we maintained detachment. But nonetheless, you are right. We were responding in a way to the freak show. I hope that we were not letting the freak show drive our own values but, unquestionably, the freak show succeeds in driving coverage.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: John, it was a pleasure talking to you.

JOHN HARRIS: Wonderful to talk with you. Thanks.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: John Harris is national politics editor for The Washington Post. He's also the author, with Mark Halperin, of The Way to Win: Taking the White House in 2008.