Earlier that night on NBC's Tonight Show, Jay Leno did a comedy bit describing Mrs. Clinton as an ice queen, a woman so cold and unfeeling that she could chill champagne merely by holding the bottle.

But on CBS, David Letterman had changed his name to "Let Her, Man." He greeted her with a kiss on the cheek, puppy-dog obeisance throughout their interview, and, even when the lovefest was finished festing, with the gift of a riding lawnmower worth roughly $1,000. For Dave, Hillary was a queen minus the ice (although hours later, as God's judgment, the first serious snowfall of the season set New Yorkers slipping and shivering).

The next day's sunlight, however, revealed what Late Night concealed. About Hillary's perfect answers to Letterman's New York trivia quiz, Adam Nagourney of the New York Times reported that "Mrs. Clinton might, in fact, have been given a sneak peek at the questions before she went on."

Think back to that interview ambush of Texas Gov. George W. Bush and the Boston journalist who asked him to name government officials of various countries. What if Bush had aced that test and come off appearing highly educated and sophisticated? And what if we later learned that the interviewer had given Bush the answers in advance—or at least the questions so that his staff could coach him on the right answers? I suspect that the national press would have gone berserk at a test rigged to make Bush appear smart.

The Letterman show apparently did something similar with Hillary Clinton. As a result, she was projected to the nation as smart, alert, educated, and well-informed when in fact without behind-the-scenes help she might have looked foolish, ignorant, and out of touch with the state where she hopes to become a U.S. Senator. Faced with evidence that this test was fake, the national media have voiced virtually no criticism. It was all in fun, said they.

Media leftists frantically dismissed the evidence of rigging in the Letterman interview. Didn't we know this was a comedy show, and that late-night comedy shows are scripted? Why quibble because the quiz was phony? Or because Letterman's own writers had crafted Hillary's "Top Ten List" of reasons she was running for Senate? Or because it turned out that even her comeback that prompted Letterman to say that people had been writing her lines was, reportedly, written not by Hillary's staff but by Letterman's?

The whole interview was an act of acting, with Hillary reciting lines that other media-smarter people had put in her mouth from beginning to end. But don't all politicians rely on speechwriters? Of course. (We should remember Ted Sorensen, and not JFK, for all those memorable lines from Camelot.) Moreover, in nocturnal TV's insomniac venue of Hollywood actresses, nightclub comics, and animal trainers, all that matters is oddness and performance. Hillary read her lines fairly well, fingered her face suggestively, and smiled a lot. Like Bill, her future may be in Hollywood. Unlike Bill, Hillary may be in front of a camera instead of on a casting couch. It was all for laughs, so why complain?

Late-night TV rescued the Clintons before, don't forget. After Bill's interminable drone put delegates to sleep at the 1988 Democratic National Convention, Johnny Carson caught Clinton's falling political star and let it shine, sax and all, on the Tonight Show. This saved the obscure Arkansas Governor from career oblivion and gave him a measure of Hollywood stardom.

It is said that a politician is doomed when the late-night hosts start laughing at him, but not when they laugh with him, as Carson did with Clinton. What happens when a candidate like Hillary, who was being laughed at by most New Yorkers, is suddenly treated seriously by a late-night host like Letterman? The point is, in their ability to plant images and judgments of politicians in millions of American minds on the hypnotic verge of falling asleep, the influence of these late-night shows is no trifle or laughing matter. Shows such as Letterman's resurrected Bill Clinton and politically destroyed Dan Quayle. We shall see if Letterman can reinvent Hillary with a human face in the public mind. Her polls scarcely inched upwards following the Letterman appearance.

Salon's puckish political reporter Jake Tapper hints semi-satirically that Hillary may soon appear on NBC's Saturday Night Live.

Among the ethical problems coming to light with Hillary's Letterman appearance are the following: the TV audience was never told that in a quiz echoing the one given George W. Bush she had been given the answer key in advance. The audience at home heard a studio audience cheering Hillary's every word, but viewers were not told that this audience, prior to the show, was told to "set your personal politics aside" and, according to some accounts of those there, was told that anyone who booed or made any disapproving noise would be removed by Hillary's Secret Service contingent. Because of this, as well as whatever partisan ticketing occurred, the audience approval of Hillary was no more authentic than a sitcom laugh-track machine. Its applause echoed with an Orwellian edge.

CBS is known as the "Clinton BS" network for good reason. As I've discussed in a past column here, 60 Minutes Executive Producer Don Hewitt has long boasted that he personally elected Bill Clinton President. During that notorious interview immediately following the Super Bowl in 1992—positioned to get the biggest TV audience of the year—Clinton acknowledged "causing pain" in his marriage, but left the impression that he had reformed and would sin no more.

This interview's TV audience was never told that the Clintons had been given all questions in advance, as Hillary was on Letterman's show. Viewers at home were never told that they were watching a pre-recorded, carefully edited creation. They were never told that Bill and Hillary were given editorial control over the interview, i.e., the power to do as many "takes" of an answer as they wished and the power to select which of these "takes" CBS would broadcast.

The Clintons, like some other figures the media are eager to interview, have agreed to do certain interviews with conditions attached, e.g., that certain topics will not be raised, or time will be limited, or the like. Hewitt, so far as I know, has never made public whether the Clintons demanded control as a precondition of doing their 60 Minutes interview or he offered it as an enticement.

Likewise, it is unclear what was demanded or offered as conditions of Hillary's ratings-bonanza appearance with Letterman. I've been a guest three times on Dave's previous show, but never had gags written for me by his staff. (I guess I'm funny enough on my own.) My subjective impression was that with Mrs. Clinton, the polite and politic Letterman behaved as if he were in a strait jacket, severely constrained in what he felt he could say or ask. (His quadruple-bypass heart surgery two days later suggests that Letterman was suffering impaired blood flow to the brain when on the day following the interview he declared that he might vote for Hillary. Those who vote for liberals typically have something wrong with their heart and head. I wish Dave a speedy and complete recovery, and a swift restoration of complete mental functioning.)

Television networks depict themselves as watchdogs over politicians. But when a politician has the power of the presidency, the networks usually to some degree behave as lapdogs. They depend on the White House for favors. They fear the President's ability to manipulate the regulatory, taxing, and other authority of the government. They want to be, or at least appear, civil and respectful. This may explain Letterman's reticence with a woman in the ambiguous position of being both a dignified First Lady and a rough-and-tumble politician. It may also explain why when Dan Rather interviewed her, he was so fawning and deferential that viewers like me expected the CBS anchorman at any moment to fall to his knees and lick Mrs. Clinton's shoes.

How odd that on the very day of Hillary's appearance on CBS's Letterman Show, Rather was apologizing. During its New Year's Eve broadcast in New York's Times Square, CBS had used a new digital technology to erase rival NBC's sign in the Square from all images CBS broadcast to the nation.

"I did not grasp the possible ethical implications of this, and that was wrong on my part," said Rather. The implications, he told the New York Times, involve creating a deliberately false image of reality and transmitting that to the nation as if it were true.

"At the very least we should have pointed out to viewers that we were doing it," said Rather. (As I have documented, Rather has not pointed out to viewers some bizarre aspects of his own past behavior and judgement.)

But how does this differ from what CBS did by knowingly broadcasting to the nation a deliberately false image of Hillary Clinton on David Letterman's show? Was that reality? Or was it pro-Hillary propaganda calculated to win votes? Was it, in effect, a CBS campaign contribution worth—at $25,000 or more per advertising minute—the equivalent of at least half a million dollars?

What else about reality does Rather erase from his newscasts? Watch to see if his coverage of Hillary's fatcat donors includes her White House party feasting at taxpayer expense on beluga caviar and lobster with Bernard Schwartz of Loral (as in "technology transfer to Communist China") Space and Communications Ltd. and at least 700 others her office refuses to name at White House parties. Watch to see if Mayor Rudy Giuliani gets credit for saving the lives and frostbitten toes of New York City homeless by requiring them to go into shelters before this week's devastating sub-zero freezing temperatures … or if Rather tells viewers that many homeless would have died had Hillary gotten her way on this issue.

We cannot even say that CBS's willingness to be a propaganda vehicle for the Clintons over the years is free from greed or profit considerations. CBS has been richly rewarded for its slavish servitude. Bill and Hillary, for instance, gave CBS the exclusive right to broadcast America's gala Millenium celebration paid for with taxpayer money and conducted on public property, the Mall in Washington, D.C., only days ago. God and a few greedy executives are among the few who know how many regulatory favors and tax-audit breaks CBS and its related enterprises have received from this administration. They have not lied for nothing. Hillary's Letterman appearance was merely the latest lie.

The Clinton White House found another way to funnel up to $25 million in extra income to CBS and five other major television networks. In an investigation by Daniel Forbes, Salon revealed that drug czar Gen. Barry McCaffrey had allowed networks to sell airtime they otherwise would have been required to devote to low-paid anti-drug public-service announcements. This was permitted when network shows like ER, Beverly Hills 90210, General Hospital, The Drew Carey Show, Sabrina the Teenage Witch, and other programs included anti-drug "messages" in their plot lines. In some cases, the networks regained these ad minutes by letting McCaffrey's White House Office of National Drug Control Policy see and direct changes in program scripts. Among the CBS shows thus pumping government-approved propaganda into the eyes and minds of unwitting viewers were Cosby, Promised Land, and Chicago Hope, the last of which by itself Forbes estimates enlarged CBS "redeemed" revenue by $500,000.

The White House might thus have violated the nation's anti-payola statutes, writes Forbes in his second article. He finds evidence that Congress did not learn of this secret White House manipulation of the nation's media until last fall, two years after the campaign began. This story was not broken by network news reporters, nor by major newspapers or magazines that now have cozy bed-sharing arrangements with the networks. It was broken by Salon, an independent online magazine, home to fine reporters and columnists such as David Horowitz.

What qualified as satisfactory propaganda to the Clinton White House drug czar? "We realize," said Gen. McCaffrey, "that you cannot shoehorn a drug message in a script where it does not belong. It must appear organically. Sometimes only a one-second frown or wave of the hand when someone is offered marijuana is all that is needed."

Mind-altering drugs are bad because they distort reality as well as the behavior of those who use them. Propaganda is a tricky thing, however noble its intent. One of the most popular films among young drug users of the 1960s was Reefer Madness, made decades earlier as an anti-marijuana propaganda film that made bizarrely extreme claims about the drug's dangers. MTV's anti-drug spots became jokes among the young because many featured rock musicians famed for their ongoing drug use pretending to condemn drugs. As the famed poster satirized the anti-drug TV spot with egg broken into a frying pan showed: "This is your brain. This is your brain on drugs. This is your brain on drugs with a side order of bacon and hash browns."

CBS has become the opiate of the masses. It, like a drug, has distorted the reality Americans see on 60 Minutes, on Dan Rather, on David Letterman, and on its primetime comedy and drama shows. It's propaganda, mostly to advance the agendas of the Clinton White House. The See BS eye symbol is the eye of Big Brother. And Americans who do not yet see what is happening are, nevertheless, starting to wake up and smell the Clintons. Has Dan Rather grasped the "ethical implications" of this? If so, let him speak now or forever be a joke.