We are the Internet, over here at Salon, at least part of it, and it was hard not to wonder exactly what Fleischer meant by his dark warning. Actually, I knew exactly what he was trying to say: The Internet is a shadowy place where reputable people don't go, where rumor and innuendo and bile simmer in the darkness until they bubble up into unsavory news stories, stories that reputable people, sadly, then have to answer questions about. What I didn't know is whether that's what Fleischer actually believes, whether he's missed the fact that for most people, the Internet is not some fringe obsession, but the place to check stock quotes, sports scores and news headlines, buy books and CDs and Gap T-shirts (plus meet new friends; more on that later) -- as well as the fact that the Internet had absolutely nothing to do with Jenna Bush making news.

The Associated Press broke the stories of Bush's alcohol citations, and that makes sense. Her troubles are a matter of public record. She's an adult, she broke the law more than once and she's the president's daughter. Her father has advocated and signed into law tough penalties for underage drinkers. Her alcohol-related mishaps are a legitimate news story, not Internet gossip.

But it was hard not to miss an odd convergence. The same week as Bush's troubles made headlines, a news story did come bubbling up from the dark reaches of the Internet: the strange tale of gay conservative Andrew Sullivan, and the supposed "hypocrisy" of his lecturing on gay politics and morality while, apparently, he looks for kinky sex on the Internet. His critics, who include gay journalists Michelangelo Signorile, David Ehrenstein and Michael Musto, have in various ways made public the details of Sullivan's Internet exploits, including his screen handle as well as the online personal "profile" the HIV-positive journalist used as he sought out opportunities for having unprotected sex with men who are also infected with the AIDS virus. Discovered on the Internet, published in print, the Sullivan story then became mainstream news.

The convergence of the Bush and Sullivan stories, as well as the public reaction to them, raises the toughest and most fascinating questions in journalism today: Why are we so obsessed with the private lives of public figures? What kind of privacy, if any, are they entitled to? And what's "private"? Is hypocrisy a good enough reason to reveal someone's secrets -- and who decides what constitutes hypocrisy? Both have now become "Internet stories" because they've taken on a life of their own on Web sites, chat rooms and message boards. Amazingly, in Salon's letters pages and elsewhere, Jenna Bush has gotten considerable sympathy for suffering media overkill, while Sullivan's humiliating sexual exposure has been widely applauded.

The reaction is, of course, ass-backwards: The Bush story is news, while Sullivan's is not.

In fact, the reaction to the Sullivan story has been scarier to me than the story itself. That Sullivan has made enemies is well known. He and Signorile have clashed before over the ethics of "outing" gay public figures who have stayed in the closet, with Signorile opting for exposing their hypocrisy and Sullivan defending their right to privacy. That Signorile would decide, along similar lines, that the public also needed to know about Sullivan's private sexual practices, in light of his moralistic public statements, doesn't shock me. I don't agree, but I'm not surprised.

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