Network news has had a long slide into the vulgar conveyance of rumor. But who, among all who witnessed on TV the drawn-out swindle of the O.J. trial and the Lewinsky scandal and the Clinton impeachment, who that marked the abject surrender of the networks to the propaganda campaign in the run-up to Iraq--who, for all these signs, could have predicted the frivolity of the questions that were asked in Wednesday's Pennsylvania debate by Charles...