Delighted as I am by the relentlessly cascading developments surrounding Rupert Murdoch’s beleaguered empire, I don’t share the optimism of worthies such as Eliot Spitzer who think  Foxworld ought to now be investigated by the DOJ under FCPA, the pretty straightforward Foreign Corrupt Practices Act that News Corp has evidently repeatedly violated.  For a lot of reasons, that sort of obviously reasonable thing could never bear fruit here, in the unlikely event that it even happened in the first place.  You see, despite the paranoid rantings of water carriers like Tucker Carlson who blame the Liberal Media for Rupert’s woes, News Corp, with FOX as its ruthless enforcer, has effectively cowed that same Liberal Media into acquiescence, if not outright emulation, of both its shoddy journalism and corrupt relationships with politicians.  Just as in the UK, politicians from both sides of the aisle are well accustomed to the ritual ring-kissing of Master Rupert, the Clintons being just one especially egregious example, and with few exceptions, the purportedly legitimate media supinely and routinely embrace FOX as one of their own; a self-destructive and aberrant choice that redounds only to the benefit of FOX at considerable expense to their already tattered credibility.

Like it or not, America is now invested in FOX, and though the investment is thoroughly underwater, we’re still unwilling to just turn it over to the bank.  For years, utter BS sold mercilessly on FOX, about everything from Clinton’s many murders to weapons of mass destruction and the climate change “hoax” have been soberly presented as “one side” of a supposedly insoluble political argument, never mind the facts.  Proven falsehoods about matters great and small are now “out there” in the bloodstream of American politics, and the dumb and shameless media stars who promoted them, despite their counterfactuality, fear the wrath of FOX far more than they fear the wrath of their deceived audiences.  After all, if nothing else FOX serves as an employer of last resort for the journalistically disgraced, a fact of which, say, Fred Hiatt couldn’t possibly be unaware.

All this creates a serious conundrum for anyone who might deign to go up against Murdoch’s empire…..  First, one can expect a ferocious onslaught of contemptuous smears from FOX itself as a matter of course; then, a tut-tutting, insidery dismissal from Howie Kurtz et al; this followed by synthesized roars out of the Professional Right from Limbaugh on down; and finally capped by the Obama DOJ or FCC giving Rupert everything he wants anyway.  Never pick a fight with someone who buys ink by the barrel, they used to say, and ol’ Rupert has figured out a way to once again prove this truism well into the digital era.  Amazing what money by the bucketload can buy, isn’t it?

So, despite the lurid revelations and widespread public disgust with News Corp and its erstwhile acolytes across the pond, it would be foolish to hope such a mass awakening could ever happen here; it would simply embarrass too many Serious people in the media who have, out of either cravenness or stupidity, swallowed the FOX ethos hook, line, and sinker, and aren’t about to admit their mistakes because of some petty whining about bribery and whatnot.  Those few in the position to meaningfully challenge what News Corp has wrought through its lies and slipshod hackery have, by and large, embraced or at least not forthrightly countered its post-reality notions about the world, from President Obama on down, and therefore are and will continue to take the Fifth.

Rupert may have lost a few billion here and there, but as long as he has FOX, he still has America.

More’s the pity.

–Col. Dave Lapan, Pentagon spokesman (with a straight face…)

The Pentagon, which devours about half of the US budget Defending our Freedom, has “asked” the news media if it would refrain from publishing the latest Wikileaks documents, ostensibly out of a sudden concern with the credibility of the media.  Yes, you read that right.  They’re pleading with the same media who relentlessly promoted the Iraq War, The “War on Terror,” and the “Axis of Evil,” among other stupid, misguided notions of the Bush Era, while unanimously dismissing opponents of torture, wiretapping, war, and indefinite detention as naive and unSerious, despite the fact that they were right.  The same shockingly discredited media that gave us Judith Miller, Tom Friedman, Bill Kristol, Fred Hiatt, David Ignatius, Jonah Goldberg, David Gregory, and on and on is now supposed to be worried about how crossing the Pentagon, for once, might damage its credibility, and thus should keep mum.  What they’re asking is kind of like asking a fish to swim, but the Pentagon’s doing it anyway.  They have a lot of taxpayer-funded spokesmen to keep busy, after all.

But why bother?  The media has fallen hook, line. and sinker for every cockamamie idea that has bubbled up from the bowels of the Pentagon swamp for twenty years; from the Kuwaiti Incubators to the Aluminum Tubes, from Star Wars to Suitcase nukes, no phony pretext was too ridiculous for the mainstream media to toss credibility to the wind and type up whatever some shadowy Pentagon flack said, however often such errant hogwash was initially disputed and subsequently disproven.  Last time the Pentagon had this sort of Wikileaks-related Depends Moment, just this summer, all of its wild threats proved utterly false, but the media published them anyway, basically ignoring what the leaks contained.  There is no evidence that they won’t do so again, but I guess if you’re the Pentagon, and your whole world is a spinning kaleidoscope of imaginary fears, even this one might sound plausible.

Trouble is, the Pentagon has achieved “full spectrum dominance” when it comes to the US media, if not in the real world, where since World War II it loses all its wars, so such dire entreaties are as silly as they are unnecessary.  Nobody at the Pentagon seriously thinks that, say, the New York Times, which obligingly withheld Bush’s warrantless wiretapping until his 2004 reelection was safely past, will suddenly find something the the 400,ooo pages of documents with which to bedevil the war machine.  Nobody expects the Washington Post, no further introduction necessary, to print anything that might send Halliburton or Blackwater stock plummeting.  Everyone knows that on TV, war sells and peace leads to poor ratings, no matter the country/cause/pretext du jour.  What, pray, is the Pentagon pretending, this time, to be afraid of?

The answer lies, I think, in the latter half of the quote above, which is unintentionally (of course) revealing….   The Pentagon has, in effect, gone all Alaska on us.  Like Senate candidate Joe Miller, who had private thugs “arrest” and handcuff an impertinent reporter, and Sarah Palin, who blames the “lamestream media” for making her look like the dangerous idiot she is, the by far largest “branch” of our supposedly Democratic government is out to destroy the credibility of any media source, however tiny and inconsequential, who dares to question them.  When you’re a hillbilly grifter attempting to ride a wave of corporate-funded paranoia to Washington, that’s one thing.  When you’re annually gobbling up $700 billion of money we don’t have creating morally indefensible violence and resentment the world over and calling it “defense,” it’s quite another.  The media have been dutifully ignoring this rather simple fact for many years; indeed, whatever “credibility” they might hope to retain depends on their willingness to cover up their many past errors, incurred mostly by believing the Pentagon, so their interests, once adversarial, have become one.

At one time, the news media felt a responsibility, however often in the breach, to dig beneath shady official pronouncements, and found it both satisfying and economically advantageous to expose official lies; in short, they had credibility, and sometimes even used it, notably during the Pentagon Papers case, when several newspaper publishers risked jail publishing what the military always calls “classified” documents about its deceitfulness and egregious crimes against humanity.

That time has passed, and someone ought to tell the Pentagon to try something else.  Unlike the rest of America, they can afford to lavishly, and perhaps effectively, sell almost anything…   Anything but credibility, that is.

I started wondering about this very human reaction to unpleasant reminders of choices that can’t be taken back, and how chagrined one feels to have been duped.  Which brings me, once again, to the firing of Dan Froomkin by Fred Hiatt at the WaPoo.  To Hiatt, Froomkin represented Hiatt’s Bush sign.  (Unfortunately, in this case, not just a sign, but dozens of enormous billboards and an armada of sky-writing airplanes….)  How could a guy who’d made such a credulous and public fool of himself for so long tolerate, in his own paper, not just a mute symbol, but a daily, damning barrage of “Nyah, nyah, nyah?”  Paul Krugman got it, no doubt from his own bitter experience at the NYT, where for some reason ol’ Pinch was even more cowardly than Hiatt, and just hid under the desk and hired Bill Kristol, while he kept the inconvenient Nobel Laureate around for “balance.”  Lord knows that the NYT’s credibility problems, from the ludicrous predictions of Tom Friedman and the addled irrelevancies of Maureen Dowd, to the flat-out malpractice of Judith Miller and wide-eyed cluelessness of Elisabeth Bumiller, could hardly be helped by summarily unloading one of the only columnists in his paper who was worth reading.

As luck would have it, Hiatt wasn’t similarly encumbered; pretty much all of his reporters were already widely recognized as mindless, corrupt shills, his paper’s every editorial position had been disastrously, exquisitely, and stunningly wrong for over a decade, and one could safely skip his leaden, drearily predictable op/ed page by lazily skimming Drudge.  If he fired Froomkin, who, exactly, would even notice?  Surely no one with two brain cells to rub together had really read his rag since, oh, 1993, and if they had, they’d probably be saying, “Nyah, nyah, nyah,” too, and raining down bothersome reminders in letters to the editor all the danged time.  If the Post were a restaurant, who needs the kind of customers who complain about the poor quality of the food, tacky decor, surly help, and never tip anyway?

At the WaPoo, their sign says that they reserve the right to refuse service to anyone, evidently, and that includes, especially, anyone who can remember what happened last week.   Looks like Hiatt won’t have to take down that sign.