DRAWN IN HASTE Repented at Leisure: Diane Dixon, Covergirl

Q: What does an axe murderer do?
A: Sells newspapers.


One day. Just one damn day. Couldn't we have had just one day to honeymoon with our cuddly new governor?

Of course not.


Note the New York Post's GIRLS! GIRLS! GIRLS! PATERSON GAL'S TAPE SHOCKER--"Olympics babe bares recording & job 'he got me'" turns out to be nothing but baloney: an evidently attention-hungry former track and field medalist e-mailed the Post that she'd secretly taped Paterson on the phone--tapes she now says she's going to destroy. Has the post heard any tapes? No. What are they of? "Conversations," she e-mailed back with a smiley face. Has she claimed the Gov slept with her? No. She says she's a single mother who's grateful to him for helping her get a job as a Family Advocate with the Board of Ed--a job she's yet to start, if it exists. The Board of Ed has no record of her. Even smut peddler Larry Flynt peddles genuine smut.



Perhaps Rupert Murdoch sees an easy path to another Republican-led era if he can get Bruno in. But Bruno has so many troubles that he'd likely soon follow Paterson. The governorship would start resembling Billy Rose's Aquacade: diving in formation.

Journalists, or, rather, the news media, like to say that among their faults is "pack journalism."

They flatter themselves. "Herd journalism" is more accurate, and "Coop journalism" more accurate still, for cud-chewers are gentler and less damaging then the old hens in Albany.

Ruminants don't write good front-page material.

Had enough of the shallow smugness with which TV reporters face into the camera and recite their 90 seconds of unimaginably intimate and surreal gossip? You're one of the few, then. Peoplemeters say the audience is eating it up. TV reporters are our modern, unthinking, brainless Furies. Pursuing sexual wrongdoers is incidental, impersonal. It's good for ratings. It gets circulation up, you could say.

Will Eliot Spitzer's resignation destroy David Paterson? I hope not. I think not. Paterson's a different number entirely: he's never been a hypocrite, he has support in Albany, and the legislators all know there's plenty of dirt to go around.

We need our governor to govern. Time for him to tell the press the subject of his sex life is closed.