IT SHOULD have been Condoleezza Rice’s finest hour as US secretary of state: at last President George W Bush was hosting a Middle East peace conference that she had been struggling to organise for months.

Yet when Rice’s photograph appeared on the front page of America’s bestselling weekly newspaper last week, it had nothing to do with her peacemaking efforts. She had been dragged into a National Enquirer article headlined “Who’s Gay and Who’s Not”.

The article revived long-standing Washington gossip about Rice’s sexuality and sparked off the usual flurry of internet chatter about her high-profile role in a Republican administration widely regarded as hostile to gays.

It also underlined the increasing friction in American politics between a high-minded media establishment disdainful of bedroom gossip and the no-holds-barred, consumer-driven world of instant internet scandal. A Google search of the words “Condoleezza” and “lesbian” last week yielded 146,000 hits.

Rice was not alone in falling victim to what the US media elite invariably decries as corrupted journalistic standards but what the rest of America seems to regard as the real story in Washington: who is sleeping with whom?

While most leading US newspapers were preoccupied with serious policy issues such as Iraq and illegal immigration, New York tabloids were feasting on startling new details about Rudolph Giuliani, the city’s former mayor, who is alleged to have concealed the cost of the security protection he needed while on secret trysts with his then mistress.

Giuliani dismissed the allegations as a “political hit job” and “dirty trick” that just happened to pop up hours before a key televised debate between Republican presidential candidates. Although it appeared that Giuliani had done nothing illegal, the fuss refocused attention on his colourful private life and may damage his appeal to conservative voters.

Political insiders also noted that the detailed allegations, including documented evidence of the accounts used to hide Giuliani’s potentially embarrassing expenses, were published not by a newspaper but by Politico.com, an increasingly influential website.

The mainstream US media also managed to ignore one of the most read political stories on the internet last week, an account in The Times about a dirty-tricks campaign in South Carolina, including anonymous allegations that Senator Hillary Clinton is having an affair with Huma Abedin, a female member of her campaign staff. Democrat officials dismissed the allegations as an obvious attempt to smear the frontrunning presidential candidate.

The former senator John Edwards, Clinton’s Democratic rival, felt the tabloid lash when the Enquirer claimed he too was having an affair with a campaign aide while his cancer-stricken wife campaigned on his behalf elsewhere. Edwards denounced the story as “false, completely untrue, ridiculous” and said the Enquirer had failed to produce evidence “because it’s made up”.

The steady flow of salacious and often thinly sourced sex-related stories is causing headaches for US newspaper editors, who have been bludgeoned by shrinking circulations and internet competition yet are still clinging to values described by one blogger last week as “snoozy, prissy and haughty”.

The drift towards internet-fuelled sensationalism was deemed to be so serious earlier this year that the Columbia Journalism Review, a bastion of US media elitism, convened a panel of top editors to consider whether the government should step in to subsidise serious newspapers as a valuable public service, along the lines of the BBC.

The Enquirer described its article as “the ultimate guessing game among Hollywood fans - trying to figure out which big-name stars are gay”. The report went on: “According to the buzz among political insiders, it’s an open secret that . . . Rice is gay.”

The piece quoted an unnamed “in-the-know” blogger as saying that during her years as provost of Stanford University in California, Rice was “completely out as a lesbian and it was not a scandal, just a reality”. The paper referred to reports that in 1998 Rice bought a house with a “special friend”, another unmarried woman, a film-maker named Randy Bean.

It was far from the first time that she had been linked to lesbian rumours. In a recent biography of Rice, Glenn Kessler, the Washington Post’s diplomatic correspondent, noted that Bean, described as a “liberal progressive”, was her “closest female friend”. It was Kessler who discovered from a search of property records that Rice and Bean owned a house together.

Rice does not comment on her private life, and she is not an elected official, so her sexuality has never been a campaign issue. But the gay community has long been troubled by her association with conservative Republicans opposed to gay marriage, and with evangelical Christians who regard homosexuality as a sin.

At one point last year Rice was regarded as a possible Republican candidate in the 2008 White House race. Yet most commentators agreed that she was reluctant to run, and a Washington Post columnist concluded that she was “the longest of long shots”, as it indeed turned out.

The columnist Chris Cillizza made no mention of Rice’s sexuality, and it took an internet reader named Anne Roifes to remind the Post that high journalistic standards sometimes miss the point.

“It is widely believed in gay circles that Condi is a lesbian,” Roifes commented. “That could be one reason she will not run.”

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