For two days this month, the media fixed its attention on George W. Bush's ability to read. On at least three separate occasions, the Texas governor was asked point-blank if he suffers from dyslexia, as an article in Vanity Fair had suggested. And, on three separate occasions, he denied it. But his denials didn't stem the speculation, which found its way into The New York Times, USA Today, the Associated Press, the Chicago Tribune, Larry King Live, Good Morning America, and numerous other organs of the Fourth Estate.

There were many reasons to pay the story no mind. For starters, there was the flimsy supporting evidence: a quote from the former head of the Maryland branch of the International Dyslexia Association (who made no claims to have met Bush); Bush's idealization of Winston Churchill, who was likely dyslexic; and the author's observation that “dyslexics are sometimes the loudmouths in school. At Andover, Bush was nicknamed ‘the Lip.’” But there was an even better reason to ignore the story—the author herself, Vanity Fair correspondent Gail Sheehy, a journalist with a world-class reputation for getting it wrong.

It's not hard to understand why a glossy like Vanity Fair would publish Sheehy's work: She delivers buzz. But the willingness of the higher-minded reporters at the Times and elsewhere to pick up her assertions and run with them reflects a broader trend: Her brand of journalism has gone mainstream. Over the past decade, the prestige newspapers have borrowed heavily from the psychobiographical approach she pioneered, interpreting the candidates through their childhood traumas, midlife crises, and pathologies. In 1993, David Maraniss of The Washington Post won a Pulitzer for his biography of Bill Clinton, which unabashedly peered inside the president's mind to study the impact of his bawdy mother. This election cycle has produced more of the same, with the Times and the Post apparently in competition to see who can devote more column inches to Bush's past drinking problem and Gore's paralyzing relationship with his father. Of course, good reporters like Maraniss and the Times' Nicholas Kristof carefully refrain from recklessly diagnosing psychological maladies. But once the papers have legitimized Sheehy's style, they can't easily shun the sensational tidbits she uses it to find.

Sheehy first gained national prominence in the 1970s as a reporter for New York magazine (whose editor at the time, Clay Felker, she later married). In 1971, Sheehy's five-part series “Redpants and Sugarman,” which detailed the travails of a Lexington Avenue prostitute and her pimp, won raves. Newsweek declared her the “hooker's Boswell.” But Sheehy was soon forced to admit that there was no “Redpants.” Her subject, she explained, was a “composite”—a fact never acknowledged in any of her published stories.

For a time, the controversy dogged Sheehy. But in 1976 she published a book of pop psychology called Passages, and its wild success—three years on The New York Times' best-seller list—gave her career a powerful boost. The thesis of Passages—that adulthood is a series of “critical turning points along the life cycle when one's vulnerability is exaggerated but one's opportunity for growth is also heightened”—became Sheehy's totalizing theory of character.

After being recruited to profile presidential contenders for Vanity Fair in 1983, Sheehy began applying the formula to political figures. For years, she bolstered the pop psychoanalysis with delicious reportorial scoops—Michael Dukakis's mentally unstable brother, Gary Hart's love of New Age hokum. But, over time, the scoops became scarcer and the psychologizing more forced. In her 1990 biography of Mikhail Gorbachev, The Man Who Changed the World, Sheehy notoriously suggested that the collapse of communism was caused by the Soviet leader's own confrontations with adversity: “For exceptional individuals, like Gorbachev,” she wrote, “such passages assume the dimensions of deep personal transformation—they become in some ways different people.” Worse than its ridiculous thesis, the book suffered from a slew of telling errors. Sheehy described organized crime as nonexistent in post-Soviet life—just as it was asserting itself as a dominant force. She argued that diabetes would be “widespread in a closed ethnic society such as Russia where people marry and reproduce, for the most part, with other Russians”—never mind that there is, genetically speaking, no such thing as a Russian. The errors were both picayune and grand: suggesting Potemkin was an actual architect; miscalculating the length of Mongol rule over Russia by at least 100 years; badly botching the names of scientific journals, artistic movements, and political figures. Reviewing Sheehy's book in these pages, Tatyana Tolstaya concluded, “The number of illiterate mistakes in this book is beyond counting.”

By the time Sheehy wrote her 1999 biography of Hillary Clinton, Hillary's Choice, finding her errors had become a kind of journalistic game. The Washington Post's “Reliable Source” column kept a running tab, called “Gail's Goofs Corner.” Pieces in The New York Observer and The Nation, uncovering a slew of other slipups, piled on. And a list of eminences came forward to claim that Sheehy had either invented quotes or twisted them out of context. (A sampling: Garry Wills, Harold Ickes, Betsy Wright.) To be fair, the mistakes were not all earth-shattering. (Does it really matter that Sheehy wrongly asserted that Mack McLarty had divorced his wife or incorrectly described the columnist Gene Lyons as a novelist?) At least one of her goofs, however, seriously undermined her argument—the claim that Hillary Clinton suffered irreparable psychological damage when her father skipped her college graduation speech. (“It should have been the peak of pride for her father,” Sheehy wrote. “But Hillary's father was competitive with his gifted daughter.”) When Hillary's press secretary aggressively asserted that her father had indeed attended her graduation, Sheehy swiftly back-pedaled. In the paperback version of Hillary's Choice, she minimized the anecdote: “Hugh Rodham was not seen hugging or congratulating his daughter.” Asked by Tim Russert whether she stood by her original contention that Hugh Rodham was not there at all, she replied, “We don't know.”

How do such mistakes happen? In part, it's simply impossible to verify Sheehy's work: Her suggestion that Bill Clinton's adultery results from “dissociative identities,” for instance, is, on its face, unfalsifiable. But talk to her past Vanity Fair fact-checkers—I spoke with three—and they provide other explanations for Sheehy's lapses. “She'll just misconstrue the whole context of what someone is trying to say, or she'll flip words around to advance her argument that this person has a particular psychological problem,” one told me. “She has very little regard for her sources,” said another. All admit that Sheehy tried to ignore their objections—telling one, “You're just a fucking fact-checker. Don't tell me what to do.” (Sheehy disputes the phrasing—“I don't usually use that language,” she told me—but not the sentiment. “I might have said, ‘You're just a fact-checker, you're not the writer, don't tell me what to do.’ That would be perfectly in order.”)

Sheehy's best-known disagreement with Vanity Fair's fact-checkers, however, was over her 1992 profile of Hillary Clinton. In the piece, Sheehy quoted the soon-to-be first lady complaining that, for all the coverage of her husband's alleged affairs, President Bush had himself been “carrying on” his own illicit tryst, “which is apparently well-known in Washington.” When Hillary claimed the quote was “a garbled version of a private conversation,” no one believed her. (“I don't think you tell a journalist about a private conversation if you don't want to have it printed,” replied Sheehy.) But Clinton was in the right. Last December, Cynthia Cotts, who had been a Vanity Fair fact-checker in 1992, revealed that, according to Sheehy's transcript, Hillary had unambiguously declared her remarks off the record. But when Cotts (now The Village Voice's media critic) recommended to editors that Sheehy cut the quote, she was rebuffed.

Ironically, as Sheehy's psychobabble has grown ever flimsier, more and more journalists have adopted her style themselves. George W. Bush alone has been the subject of three full-scale campaign biographies that dwell almost entirely on matters characterological. Even Kristof's profiles in The New York Times, running under the New Agey title “Governor Bush's Journey,” peddle their share of dime-store psych: “[O]ne theme runs through each stage of his life: hero worship of his father, leading to an instinct to follow his father's trail.” As Slate's Judith Shulevitz puts it, “The question of whether and how a politician has grown in his or her adult years has become the master narrative of American politics.”

But if the trend toward journalism as amateur psychology makes it easier for Sheehy to get her nuggets picked up in the mainstream press, it also makes her life harder. In fact, one reason for Sheehy's increasing sensationalism may be the competition: With so many reporters now on her turf, her discoveries have to be more and more outrageous to stand out. Unfortunately, she keeps descending to the challenge.