“How Monica Lewinsky Changed the Media” is the headline the Daily Beast has put over the dispatch by its founder, Tina Brown. She laments the landscape left by the scandal that led to the impeachment of President Clinton. She writes that Ms. Lewinsky, writing in Vanity Fair, “brings back a torrent of unfond memories of the appalling cast of tabloid gargoyles who drove the scandal.” She includes the “treacherous thatched-roof-haired” Linda Tripp, the “cackling, fact-lacking hack Lucianne Goldberg,” the “mealy-mouthed Pharisee Kenneth Starr,” plus the “solitary, perfectly named Matt Drudge.”

We have nothing but regard for Ms. Brown, one of the great chief editors of her generation. We share her fondness for newspapering in the pre-Internet age. She and her husband, Harold Evans, are geniuses at such newspapering. But in the story of the Clinton years, we would count Mr. Drudge as one of the heroes (Ms. Goldberg, too); Mr. Drudge scooped Newsweek on a story it knew about but flinched from running. Hard to imagine that happening were Ms. Brown or Harry Evans editing Newsweek. They would have known a magazine can’t survive getting scooped on its own story.

It wasn’t just the Internet or “tabloid gargoyles” that drove the Clinton scandals. There were titanic, pre-Internet newspapermen driving the story. The greatest of them were the editor of the Wall Street Journal, Robert Bartley, and the editor-in-chief of the American Spectator, R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. If there is a press scandal of the era, it is not the uppity-ness of the Internet pioneers but the recalcitrance of those who shrank from holding President Clinton to account because they were otherwise sympathetic to the Clintons’ political agenda.

We ourselves had twice endorsed — and voted for — Mr. Clinton for president. At the time we were editing the Forward. We hoped that the Arkansan, then the senior American governor, could lead the Democrats back from the years in the wilderness under Senator McGovern. Though we admired Kenneth Starr as an individual, we opposed the special prosecutor on constitutional grounds, even as Messrs. Bartley and Tyrrell urged him on. Bartley had himself once opposed an independent prosecutor, but, in the wake of Morrison v. Olson, his view was that Americans were entitled to use the tools the Nine allowed. Bartley, one of the last honest men (he died in 2003), came to believe that President Clinton had lied under oath.

This is a moment to remember that the Lewinsky story was but a small part of the saga; the Whitewater scandals pre-dated the Clinton presidency, as did the problem of marital infidelity. The White House travel office scandal erupted early in the Clinton presidency. Mr. Clinton’s White House Counsel, Vincent Foster, committed suicide six months into Mr. Clinton’s presidency. The Journal and the Spectator had long since figured out the administration’s character, as had the editorial page of the New York Times. Mr. Drudge’s famous scoop on the Lewinsky affair came five years into a presidency that had been ridden with scandal from the start.

It may be uncomfortable that Ms. Lewinsky has returned to tell her tale. But it was to be expected as Mrs. Clinton eyes the presidency. Our guess is that she’s going to go for it. She really wonders what difference Benghazi makes. Maybe she will prove that she can survive politically the way she survived the scandals of the 1990s. The Press, now including the Internet along with the newspapers, is just getting tuned up, however. And Ms. Brown is no-doubt right that the press is a different institution than it was back in the day. Ms. Brown herself is coaching Mrs. Clinton to avoid a campaign and go straight to her “post-presidency.” Of all the advice Mrs. Clinton has received, that could prove to be the wisest.