Eighty million Americans are on the Internet. Fifty million of them surf the Net every day. Twenty-two million of those people log on looking for news.

Tear up what you know or think you know about politics. It's all changing.

For thirty years the media dominated politics. Journalists, reporters, and pundits shaped the way we received information. They controlled what we knew about issues and politicians, and consequently influenced what and how we thought of them. Inside information and the threat of scandal was their most potent weapon. But now their weapon has lost its edge.

Today, inside information is available to anyone at the click of a mouse. No pundits to interpret it, no press secretaries to spin it. Information. Opinion. Raw data. It's all there on the Internet. And it's yours without anything between you and the source. The Internet is replacing the traditional media as the driving force in American political life, and the result is nothing short of a cultural revolution.

Drawing upon his years as adviser to Bill Clinton, Dick Morris analyzes the Clinton presidency as a virtual case study in how impotent the media is becoming. The Lewinsky debacle dealt the media its coup de grace. In effect, they threw an impeachment and nobody came. The first lesson is that the threat of scandal doesn't matter anymore. But the more significant lesson is that Americans have become as skeptical about journalists as they are about elected officials, bureaucrats, and lawyers.

As the print and broadcast, media -- commonly referred to as the Fourth Estate -- falters and fails, a new estate is rising in power. The Fifth Estate, as Dick Morris has dubbed it, is the amalgam of Internet technology and the rapidly growing number of voters who use the technology...