"My theory," my roommate told me as we sat in our apartment, flipping past Fox News Channel and CNN, "is that she got pregnant, threatened to tell his wife, and he had her killed. Either that, or they were doing something kinky, she died, and he had her incinerated."

I don’t have to supply names for the "he" and "she" for you to know whom we were discussing. After all, the tale of Rep. Gary Condit (D-Calif.) and his alleged paramour, missing Washington, D.C., intern Chandra Levy, has been the media’s mother lode all summer. And we’re eating it up: Variety reported Aug. 1 that ratings for CNN, Fox News and MSNBC were up an average of 73 percent last month over July 2000.

And while interest has inevitably dropped off as August vacations have begun, 62 percent of Americans said they were "very or somewhat closely" following the story last month, according to a July 19-22 CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll. The same poll, incredibly, found that 64 percent of respondents believe it "very or somewhat likely" that Condit was "directly involved" in Levy’s disappearance — this despite the fact that there hasn’t been a shred of evidence pointing to Condit’s involvement.

What makes Americans — like my roommate, for example — so suspicious, even convinced, that the congressman kidnapped or killed Chandra? Certainly, Condit’s denials, evasions, and his little trip to a certain Northern Virginia trash can haven’t helped his case. Let’s face it: It’s not as if the media has arbitrarily singled him out. But still, must every detail of Condit’s life be broadcast with the intensity — and the frequency — usually reserved for coverage of, say, wars?

"These news services [have a] need to generate a ’story of the century,”" says Robert Thompson, director of Syracuse University’s Center for the Study of Popular Television. Although now, he adds, "We’re getting a story of the century about every two or three months." Over on my muted television, as I talk to Thompson, Bill O’Reilly or Larry King or some talking head — it’s all a blur — is poring over the latest Levy developments.

At what price, though? Will Gary Condit be the next Bill Clinton — in which case suspicions sometimes turn out to be true — or the next Richard Jewell, hapless victim of circumstance? The way Harvard University’s Alex Jones sees it, some of the media have all but convicted Condit. "There’s an appalling rush to judgment, and a tone of presumed guilt," says Jones, director of Harvard’s Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy. 

Jones faults cable TV talk shows in particular for stooping to “bringing in the psychics and studying [Condit's] facial expressions.” The presumption of guilt is veiled, he adds, but only thinly. 

And televising Condit’s committee meetings in a split-screen with searches for Levy’s body makes it nearly impossible not to connect Condit with Levy’s disappearance. After all, Thompson notes, virtually all of us get our Condit-Levy I.V. drip only from the media, so of course the degree and type of coverage affects our view of Condit. Still, it’s hard to believe the Gallup poll numbers are as high as they are.

But what about the public’s role in shaping the news coverage? Do consumers bear some responsibility for the media frenzy? Joel Smith, a Duke University professor emeritus of sociology, thinks so. According to Smith, the media and viewers are “engaged in an interactive process in which each shapes and influences the other, albeit imperfectly.”

"One of our major errors in how we think about the media is to treat them as though they were separate from, rather than an integral part, of society," says Smith, author of Understanding the Media: A Sociology of Mass Communication. "To have an impact, coverage must resonate with themes that already are matters of general interest. The interests of the American public are already heavily invested in sex, crime and the ephemera of politics." In other words, those interests may be sustained or intensified by the media, but they’re not created by the media.

Smith suspects the media affects public perception of blame not with its quantity of coverage, but with the presentation. "It isn’t by accident that the term for an item being covered as news is a ’story,”" he says. “Stories explicitly or implicitly place their characters in roles, and that is why the media seem to be implicated in the construction of presumptive guilt.

“Once the story is framed, it becomes very difficult to make major changes in the roles of the participants and still maintain credibility with the public without new and discordant ‘facts,’" he adds.

Framing a story, providing information amidst a landscape of villains and heroes, is nothing new. It’s how news has been delivered for decades: break down the complex into the personal. We’ve come to rely on the formula. Consider the daily transformation of complex political debate into partisan tales of conquest, or even coverage of the Olympics, reduced to “How Athlete X overcame (insert hardship here) to become a champion.”

So are we just watching a real-life soap opera, with the same media-programmed characters showing up every 15 minutes on cable news channels? Are we merely extrapolating in our minds the course of events that we’d expect were this fiction?

A successful news story needs a narrative, but Thompson notes that going by the straight facts of Condit-Levy case, there isn’t one narrative — there’s two: "There’s a woman gone missing, and no evidence as to her whereabouts. And there’s a congressman with whom she was romantically involved. So far, no evidence links the two stories. But, present the two together, and there will be a natural tendency in people’s minds to link them."

Of course, not everyone links the narratives. Out of curiosity, I asked a handful of friends for their thoughts on Levy’s fate. Less than half faulted Condit; some cooked up elaborate plots: Chandra hidden away in a South Malibu bungalow, pregnant with Gary Jr.; Chandra joining a circus; Chandra felled by a serial killer (most believe she is dead).

One friend, Linda, took creative liberties: "Ever since the election, things have been just plain weird in Washington," she said. As a sequel to Sen. Jim Jeffords leaving the Republican party, shifting control of the Senate, "[Condit] will eventually get booted out, a Republican will end up in [his seat] and the media can have another field day. Yes, I realize he’s a [representative], not a senator, but it makes a better plot point my way. You should never ask a writer these questions."

Of course, we are all writers in a sense — it’s just that most of us only exercise our imaginations inside our own minds. As we "write" the rest of the Levy story in our heads, perhaps we are simply following our storytelling instincts, gleaned from countless books and films — Condit’s the "bad guy," he’s acting as if he has something to hide, so why not pin it all on him? We’re all ready to stand in for Jessica Fletcher.

But this Murder, She Wrote syndrome aside, actual fiction writers do have the advantage of creation. "In a sense, they tell a story how we’re most comfortable hearing it," Thompson says. That is, one with a clear structure, closure, and often a happy ending, with justice served.

"The real world doesn’t have that,” he adds, “But the tendency is to watch news [and expect it] to supply the same closure."

Recent events have supplied us with just that: exposition, rising action, crisis, climax and denouement. It’s as if we’re collectively reliving ninth-grade English. O.J., Monica, and last year’s twin Florida titans, Elian and the recount, are perfect examples of what Thompson calls "news cooperating so well in being great fiction."

With Simpson, says Thompson, we had the long trial, culminating in the "climactic, unexpected not-guilty verdict. It behaved like a brilliantly crafted mystery." And as for Election Night and its aftermath? More incredulous than a John Le Carre novel. "Nobody would have believed that," Thompson says.

"There’s an oppressive force that [makes us] want news stories to be like the ones our mother read us," albeit with more blood and sex, Thompson says. And hence, as Smith argues, the characters in them fill certain roles. Does the public think Condit is guilty because of his status as the “villain,” or is it a consequence of the media’s portrayal of the congressman? Some of both, most likely.

Maybe Condit is just a scoundrel, a most unlucky scoundrel, who unexpectedly found himself in the midst of a missing person investigation. “It is so tempting to go to the idea of where there’s smoke, there must be a fire," Thompson says.

A raging fire, of course, makes a much better story.

Chris Wright is a copy editor at Federal Computer Week magazine in Falls Church, Va.