Remember the biased ''mainstream media'' that would stop at nothing to protect the Clinton White House? Funny how you don't hear about that anymore. If there's one certain casualty of Monicagate so far, it's the notion that the likes of Newsweek, The Washington Post, The New York Times and the big three networks will suppress news out of loyalty to a supposed liberal comrade.

This was always a canard. To take just one example, it was Jeff Gerth of The Times who broke the Whitewater story six years ago this week. And it's conservative media that more often do bidding for their ideological own. The most unabashedly partisan figure among media magnates is hardly Katharine Graham or Michael Eisner -- it's our naturalized Citizen Rupert Murdoch.

Citizen Murdoch not only uses his empire to promote his allies and punish his enemies (from Bill Clinton to Ted Turner); he goes so far as to put politicians on the payroll. That brilliant author Newt Gingrich was offered a $4.5 million payday from Mr. Murdoch's publishing house, HarperCollins, just as telecommunications matters financially crucial to the mogul's Fox properties were in play on Capitol Hill. Last week it was revealed by the London newspaper The Daily Telegraph that Mr. Murdoch had again misused HarperCollins, this time in a manner that even his political allies might find offensive. Yet there has been mostly silence from conservative journalists about this scandal -- even in American media properties that Mr. Murdoch doesn't own.

What Mr. Murdoch did was to see to it that HarperCollins canceled its scheduled fall publication in Britain of a memoir by Chris Patten, the last British Governor of Hong Kong. Despite a HarperCollins cover story, The Telegraph uncovered a smoking in-house memo that revealed the truth: Mr. Patten's sin had been to criticize the Government of China, whose favor Mr. Murdoch needs if he is to expand his already burgeoning TV and movie deals in the vast market it controls.