The newspaper hits the desk in the oval office, and President Clinton frowns as he scans the front page. "White House linked to fund-raising scandal," the headline blares, followed by an embarrassing report of a clumsy cover-up by White House staffers.

"I don't like it," Clinton finally says, quietly, his eyes still fixed on the incriminating bold type.

Luckily for him, this is just a pre-edition of tomorrow morning's Washington Post, one sent only to the Oval Office for its approval. The President quickly phones the Post newsroom, and they are promptly forced to pull the story before the paper hits newsstands tomorrow morning.

This fictional scenario is a nightmare for journalists in a free country. The media's independence defines their role: they are a separate voice in public discourse precisely because in reality, President Clinton reads the morning paper with the rest of us. You're not just getting fed a line from White House mouthpieces who want to draw a happy face over everything.

Any other scenario invokes the iron fist of totalitarian regimes, under which the press is but a propaganda pump.

So why, then, did a major American publication recently choose to make this nightmare a reality? Why was it hijacked by an entity it covers, all by its own choice?

CBS SportsLine, one of the most popular sports sites on the Internet, owns GolfWeb, an online golf magazine once known for solid reporting and strong commentary. This past summer SportsLine merged GolfWeb with the PGA Tour's official site, PGATour.com, and gave the tour control over what would be posted.

This shocking selling-out led to everything from the nixing of the headline "Tiger outshines Duval" for being too negative (ą la Clinton's red phone to the newsroom) to lagging coverage of black eyes for the PGA Tour, such as John Daly's fall back into alcoholism.

It was like giving President Clinton full control of the Post. Disgusted reporters and muzzled columnists weren't dumb enough to stick around. So now the site is just a spineless PR pump. Its soul was sold. GolfWeb's address simply redirects you to PGATour.com, as does CBS SportsLine's golf news link. (Imagine a Washington Post link called "White House News" redirecting to the White House's official site.)

This may seem picky, but the situation is a key snapshot of a new era of media, when money trumps principles, and the Web blurs all sorts of lines. This is the age of AOL-Time Warner, in which so many potential and actual conflicts of interest exist that it is tedious to trace them all.

As mammoth media companies amass more outlets, and stockholders get more anxious, principles are all the more quickly abandoned. Online conflicts of interest such as SportsLine's are easily smoothed over.

So let's take the time to learn a few lessons from SportsLine's selling out:

First, specifically regarding the site: SportsLine has casually prostituted its integrity and should be taken for the phony it is. Not only did it shame itself hopping into bed with the PGA Tour, but SportsLine also merged with a sports gambling site, VegasInsider.com, a dubious connection for an outlet that at least pretends to be about journalism. That it expects us to take it seriously as a sports news site is an insult to our intelligence.

The larger lessons here start with the simple fact that surfing the Web these days must be done accompanied by a grain of salt. SportsLine had an agenda for GolfWeb -- one that involved a lot of dough and little journalism -- and they're hardly alone.

What's more troubling is that the ball is in our court as consumers, too. SportsLine received little more than a whimper of protest when it merged with the league it was supposed to cover objectively. Few realized what was actually going on, dazzled by the Tour site's bells and whistles such as statistic trackers and video clips. Oblivion to the ulterior motives prevailed.

As consumers in a new media age we have to be astute, skeptical, and a thorn in the side of editors and executives who lose their principles on their way to the bottom line. Every time a major merger begets still more conflicts of interest we take one more step on a slippery slope -- one that slides to the oval office editing session. Such a scenario may indeed come about, not by brute force of a totalitarian regime, but by producers and consumers of media who are numbed by money to the consequences of their actions.

Copyright © 2000 Nathan Bierma All Rights Reserved

Nathan Bierma is a freelance sportswriter and editor of the sports Web site WBBL.com. He resides in Grand Rapids, Michigan.