Ponzi Bedtime Story?

In a time of falling home prices and trillion-dollar bailouts, one market seems to be up as a young candidate for a master's in family and marriage therapy reports that 10,000 bidders for her virginity have pushed the price to $3.7 million.

Skeptics in the age of Madoff may be forgiven for their doubts about such returns from what these days might be considered a modest investment.

The young woman's enterprise recalls the response of a friend of mine with a large public relations company to young job seekers fresh out of college who would tell him they were ready to sell out.

"That's fine," he would say. "Now what is it exactly that you have to sell?"

These days, the "Buyer Beware" signs are up for everyone, journalists included.

The Malia-and-Sasha Scrum

Pictures of the Obama children's first day of school in a crowd of Secret Service agents are a reminder of how life will change for these two little girls and how hard it will be to provide them with a semblance of normality.

Michelle Obama has said they will be making their own beds in the White House, but it will take more than that for Malia and Sasha to keep some sense of the life they led up to now.

I saw this White House effect up close when Lynda Bird Johnson came to work for me right out of college in 1966, and today's scenes at Sidwell Friends School recalled her first day at work.

To avoid the media crush, we decided to smuggle her into the office, hold a press conference later and then get reporters and cameramen out of the building.

The day before, I showed the Secret Service the freight elevator, which on the ground floor opened to a parking lot obscured from the main entrance. Her agents had a plan to fake out reporters by having one of them at the main entrance on a walkie-talkie to suggest an imminent arrival there. Another was stationed the parking lot entrance. As Lynda Bird's car approached undetected he waved it in; if the press had caught on, he would have sent it to the main entrance.

It worked, but not without a touch of farce. As the car pulled up to the freight entrance, two men came out wheeling a large metal frame that got wedged in the doorway. The sight greeting the President’s daughter on her first day was the backside of her editor bending over to help the workmen carry it out.

To prevent gawking, our managing editor took Lynda Bird around and introduced her to every last soul on the staff, including secretaries and messengers. Then she went off to sign employment forms, while the personnel director explained the company pension plan.

After lunch, we went to the corporate conference room for the press conference with a human wall stretching across the room in a semi-circle three layers deep; mounted TV cameras in back, hand-held video recorders in front of them aiming over the shoulders of kneeling still photographers. Lights blazed on, and the mass of flesh, metal and glass started writhing around us, the semi-circle getting smaller. We edged to the microphones, Lynda Bird said a few words and left the room. Then I answered questions.

"Will she be treated just like any other employee?” "Yes, just like any other employee who comes to work with Secret Service agents and goes home to the White House on weekends."

The media have multiplied since then, and no matter how hard the Obamas try, it will be very hard to get their daughters treated just like any other children.

Tipping Point: Journalist-Free Journalism

As newspapers cut 1,000 jobs last week, Americans are getting their sense of the world less and less through human eyes and ears than from TV cameras abetted by well-groomed mannequins gushing over an endless flow of images.

Talking heads on cable and bloggers online parse and pick away at what the cameras see but there are fewer and fewer reporters to find out what's hidden by using such old-fashioned skills as observation, questioning and legwork.

Where is the tipping point at which "news" becomes all opinion all the time about "facts" supplied by self-interested sources?

Newspapers are drowning in red ink even as Americans depend more heavily on what they do but don't pay for the information they get from them digitally and advertisers don't cover the costs of allowing them to continue providing it.

The challenge, according to the Project for Excellence in Journalism, is to "reinvent their profession and their business model at the same time they are cutting back on their reporting and resources." A top news executive is quoted as saying, "It’s like changing the oil in your car while you’re driving down the freeway."

Meanwhile, Timothy Egan argues on his New York Times blog, "there’s plenty of gossip, political spin and original insight on sites like the Drudge Report or The Huffington Post--even though they are built on the backs of the wire services and other factories of honest fact-gathering. One day soon these Web info-slingers will find that you can’t produce journalism without journalists, and a search engine is no replacement for a curious reporter."

Meanwhile Rush Limbaugh gets a new $400 million contract for spouting off on one medium, while Lou Dobbs, Bill O'Reilly and Keith Olbermann (bless his splenetic soul) dominate another with their points of view.

The pay and job security are nowhere near as good in the mills that provide their raw material.

AP: Accusatory and Patronizing

As an editor and publisher, I spent part of my working life dealing with copyright infringement and fair use, so it's fascinating to find the Associated Press today in a fumbling effort to limit use of its content by bloggers.

To start, no one's work should be redistributed at random, but that's hardly what bloggers do in reproducing, almost always with attribution, portions of the news that AP publishes and commenting on it, almost always with links to the source of the material.

In the case chosen to set an example, the AP leaned on the satirical Drudge Retort over seven items containing quotations ranging from 39 to 79 words, hardly a wholesale lifting, leading to the suspicion that the news syndicate was more upset by the appropriator's tone than the "theft."

That's less a defense of copyrighted material than the act of a would-be censor.

“We are not trying to sue bloggers,” its "strategy director" says. “That would be the rough equivalent of suing grandma and the kids for stealing music. That is not what we are trying to do.”

That's adding insult to insult. Bloggers may want avoid using AP stuff--there are so many other news sources from which to steal our pathetic little music.

Narrowing News and Drive-By Journalism

Two stories hogged the attention of Americans in 2007 with "reverse trajectories," at first the war in Iraq, which declined in interest as the '08 Presidential elections took over the spotlight.

That's a main conclusion of the State of the News Media 2008 report, just released by the Project for Excellence in Journalism, which also cites "markedly short attention span" stories such as the Virginia Tech massacre, the Minneapolis bridge collapse and the California wildfires, one-week wonders that drew intense coverage and suddenly faded from sight.

Subjects least covered last year included urban sprawl, the legal and court system, religion, transportation, education, and race, gender and sexual identity issues, none of which attracted more than 1% of coverage over all.

"This kind of news," the report says, "requires more continuous attention to be able to understand and explain incremental changes along the way or to know when the small changes have added up to something more comprehensive-- specialists, beats, sentinels assigned to watch. Many news organizations have cut back on staff devoted to specific beats like these.

"Also, news that breaks, such as car crashes or explosions, generates more immediate news appeal, often involving strong visuals or attention-grabbing headlines."

Economic pressures dominate the worries of journalists, rather than the issues of media credibility and the quality of news coverage.

More people get their news online than ever before, as media sites steer readers away from their own content and link to outside sources.

According to the report, "Web sites run by citizen journalists are multiplying--rapidly approaching 1,500 heading into 2008--offering stories, blogs and videos. And that trend is considered a healthy one by professional journalists, who call on citizens more frequently to inform their reporting."

Hybrid journalism is evolving rapidly, but questions about whether Americans who know more make up a public that understands more still have far from clear answers.

The Posthumous Diary of Heath Ledger

In an era of fake memoirs, Esquire now gives us a new variation on masturbatory journalism--the fictional diary.

For "a conceivable chronicle of Heath Ledger's final days," the editors explain, "writer Lisa Taddeo visited the actor's neighborhood, talked to the store owners and bartenders who may have seen him during his last week, and read as many accounts and rumors about the events surrounding his death as possible. She filled in the rest with her imagination. The result is what we call reported fiction."

Others might call it exploitation, but the magazine has been inventing new ways of excavating reality for half a century since the days of the New Journalism, when Harold Hayes turned novelists like James Baldwin and Norman Mailer into reporters, and journalists like Tom Wolfe into novelists.

In those days of digging for more than surface truth, there was a minor figure named A. J. Weberman, who can be seen now as a media prophet. Starting with Bob Dylan, Weberman's way of deconstructing celebrities was to scour their garbage for clues to their essence. It got to the point where J. Edgar Hoover was reported to be having agents surreptitiously remove his and put out fake garbage to throw reporters off the scent.

Ms. Taddeo's "diary" is in that tradition, an attempt to turn detritus into journalistic art, starting with an invented warning by Jack Nicholson to "stay away from the god damn pills" to a coda on celebrity:

"I don't know how it will be for you, but for me, you wake up one more time and everything is really bright, like a flashbulb. Everything is clear as vodka. And then you go back to sleep again. One last punch-drunk opening of the eyes is what you get, and guess what--it's enough.

"So hey, buddy, why so serious? Chin up. It's all part of the plan."

Esquire's circulation plan perhaps, but we can only hope they don't start teaching this stuff in journalism schools.

The Drudges' Generation Gap

They are digital gatekeepers, but the father runs an online library and the son is the proprietor of a news whorehouse.

Outing Prince Harry in Afghanistan and showing Barack Obama in Muslim garb are the latest triumphs of "the world's most powerful journalist," as the UK Telegraph now dubs Matt Drudge, stretching the definition of all three words.

In an era when clicks are currency, Robert Drudge's refdesk.com, "Fact Checker for the Internet," is clearly outvalued by his son's millions of links to facts, factoids and junk news from everywhere.

The story is familiar by now--Young Drudge's Dickensian youth of abject intellectual and psychological poverty and his Horatio Alger ascent after a despairing father gave him a cheap computer--the 7-Eleven years, the psychiatric treatment with Jewish Social Services, the climb back to become manager of a CBS gift shop, the rummaging for scoops in the Hollywood City trash cans before cleaners fed them to the shredders...

A 21st century success story best summarized by the Great Summarizer himself: "24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a 12-month year, 10 years a decade, 10 decades a century, and 10 centuries a millennium, as far as a chip can see, wire services from all over the world move raw data ... all over the world!

"I can access, edit, headline and ... link to it all!

"Throw it up on a website and wait for you to come.

"For seven pre-millennial years, I've covered the world from my Hollywood apartment, dressed in my drawers.

"I've reported when, how, and what I've wanted...

"There's been no editor, no lawyer, no judge, no president to tell me I can't...

"Technology has finally caught up with individual liberty."

As Mel Brooks' Max Bialystock would say, "When you've got it, baby, flaunt it!" But Drudge might want to take a look back at his 20th century counterpart, Walter Winchell, who owned the world of gossip with his punchy phrasing and unfettered "reporting" back then.

Another of today's icons, Larry King, who succeeded the gossip master at his newspaper job, recalls: "He was so sad. You know what Winchell was doing at the end? Typing out mimeographed sheets with his column, handing them out on the corner. That's how sad he got. When he died, only one person came to his funeral."

Sic transit... Wait, I have to check the exact quote on Robert Drudge's web site.

Barbarians at the Gray Lady's Gates

The year has not started well for the New York Times. While taking fire for the John McCain story, its family ownership is under siege from hedge funds that have now accumulated over 15 percent of the company's Class A shares.

Symbolically, the attackers are led by Scott Galloway, most often seen in a charity-ball photograph dressed as a blue-faced, sword-wielding Scottish rebel from the movie "Braveheart." But Galloway and his group are digital warriors who insist they don't want to overthrow the old order, just bring it into the 21st century.

In asking for four seats on Times Company board, they wrote that "we are not pursuing a change in the dual class shareholder structure. The New York Times is a great institution controlled by the Sulzberger family and we have no illusion about, or desire to change, that fact...

"We believe a renewed focus on the core assets and the redeployment of capital to expedite the acquisition of digital assets affords the greatest shareholder appreciation and creates the appropriate platform to compete in today’s media landscape."

For their $400 million investment so far, Galloway's invaders have received little encouragement. Their four nominees for the board have been rejected in favor of new Sulzberger choices including, significantly, a close associate of Warren Buffet's.

Nothing like a Rupert Murdoch takeover of the Wall Street Journal is on the horizon, but with 97 percent of its revenue coming from paper-based properties and stock prices falling, the Company is vulnerable to such criticism, as reported by the Washington Post, that "with a market capitalization of $2.8 billion, the single most valuable asset the Times Co. owns, some analysts say, is its new midtown Manhattan headquarters, which may be worth as much as $1 billion. Some have caustically remarked that the Times Co. is now a REIT--a real estate investment trust-- with a newspaper attached."

Amid denunciations of its McCain takeout from the Right and much of the Left, all this is a reminder that the New York Times is one of the few remaining media institutions still family-controlled and being nominally run as a public trust in a time when corporate ownership and "shareholder appreciation" are the rules of the game.

For those who have spent a lifetime in journalism, all this pressure on "the newspaper of record" is a sobering reminder that the old rules in most places are long gone.

The NY Times Defines Deviancy Down

The Gray Lady won't win its 96th Pulitzer Prize with today's "expose" of John McCain's history of ethical struggles and leering innuendo about his relationship with a young woman lobbyist.

In fact, the Times' takeout is bigger news than its contents. The long leadup to publication has been a source of journalistic gossip for months, and the timing is attributed to worries about being beaten on the story by another media behemoth, the New Republic.

The days of the Pentagon papers, The New York Times vs Sullivan case that changed libel law and the universal respect for columnists like James Reston and Tom Wicker are long gone. Today we have William Kristol and this--a long rehash of McCain's political lapses, coupled with a low-fact personal smear.

In defining deviancy downward, as Daniel Patrick Moynihan might say, the Times has done more than open the door for its rabid right-wing haters. The newspaper of record has put pressure on itself to do a similar job on Barack Obama and his Antoin Rezko connections or face an election-year barrage of continuing criticism.

A long mea culpa from its Public Editor next weekend won't be enough to undo the damage.

McCain's Cockiness

Forget the poll numbers. The surest sign of a winner is making ballsy jokes, and John McCain is back doing that.

When Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post asks why, unlike most other candidates, he is so accessible to reporters, McCain responds, "I enjoy it a lot. It keeps me intellectually stimulated, it keeps me thinking about issues, and it keeps me associated with a lower level of human being than I otherwise would be."

Kurtz notes, "How candidates treat reporters shouldn't matter in the coverage, but it does. Journalists tend to reward those who engage them and get testy when they are stiffed, concluding that such candidates are overly calculating and wary of unscripted exchanges."

When McCain made an unusual trip without his press contingent, a reporter asked, "What did you do without us this morning? Were you hanging out with other reporters?"

McCain acted horrified. "I was not unfaithful," he insisted.

Lest all this seem lovable, it pays to remember that Nancy Pelosi's daughter, of all people, made a documentary in 2000 about how charming and lovable George Bush was on his campaign plane, and we know how that turned out.

Nine-Year-Old Scoop

The Drudge Report works in wondrous ways.

The banner this morning, under a picture of Mike Huckabee wagging his finger, is 'Take This Nation Back for Christ' leading to a news report of his speech at a Southern Baptist Convention. The small type notes it was made in 1998.

Click through, and you get the story from the Arkansas Democrat Gazette, making the then-governor sound as if he wants, not to be President, but Pastor-in-Chief of the nation.

"The reason we have so much government is because we have so much broken humanity," it quotes him as saying. "And the reason we have so much broken humanity is because sin reigns in the hearts and lives of human beings instead of the Savior...

"Government knows it does not have the answer, but it's arrogant and acts as though it does. Church does have the answer but will cowardly deny that it does and wonder when the world will be changed...

"I didn't get into politics because I thought government had a better answer. I got into politics because I knew government didn't have the real answers, that the real answers lie in accepting Jesus Christ into our lives."

The provenance of this Drudge scoop is suggested by the fact that the speech was made in Salt Lake City, where reporters were given copies of a book Huckabee had written as well as one titled "Mormonism Unmasked," exposing the beliefs of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Cui bono to make Huckabee look like a religious nut? Or, in today's world, would his supporters consider the story a plus?

Mall Killings: The Arc of Insane Fame

Half a century ago, TV created a new kind of American assassin, one who would escape insignificance by killing someone famous--a President or a star like John Lennon--and become famous for doing it.

Now we are in a new phase of this madness, where quantity has replaced quality in selecting victims. After yesterday's random killing of eight people in an Omaha mall, police report finding a suicide note from the 19-year-old shooter, who had been fired by MacDonald's, saying he was going to be famous.

He joins the Virginia Tech rampage killer who left self-pitying videos in achieving notoriety through mass murder. Perhaps this new stage of insane fame was inevitable. Arthur Bremer, who was just released after 35 years in prison, wanted to assassinate Richard Nixon but settled for Gov. George Wallace because the President was too well-guarded. It's so much easier to kill numbers of people at random.

In our grief, perhaps we should do with these sociopaths what the media do with rape victims, withhold their names, certainly not to protect them but to deny them the fame that motivated their savagery. It's the least we can do out of respect for the victims.

Media Sellouts

From right and left, critics accuse the nation's media of selling out the American people but, while the debate rages, the real selling is not by the media but of them.

On PBS last night, Bill Moyers highlighted the latest attempt to consolidate television, radio, newspapers and magazines even further into the hands of half a dozen conglomerates, Rupert Murdoch's among them.

This time the effort is being rushed along by FCC Chairman Kevin J. Martin, who as a 33-year-old lawyer worked on the Bush legal team for the 2000 Florida vote recount and, with no media background, was appointed to the commission less than six months later.

In 2003, an attempt to concentrate media ownership was beaten back after a public outcry by interest groups ranging from the National Organization for Women and Common Cause to the National Rifle Association and the pro-life Family Research Council.

Now, in the waning days of Bush's Administration, his 3-2 majority on the FCC is trying to rush through similar relaxing of cross-ownership rules by next month, but again the public and Congress are trying to head them off at the pass.

"Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty" was a slogan in the mid-nineteenth century when Americans were trying to abolish slavery. It's still applies now when a radical White House seems determined to enslave our minds.

Outsourcing the Search for Truth

In an implied rebuke to junk journalism, a rich California couple is underwriting investigative reporters to give away their work to mainstream media. It won’t work.

Acting in a free-lance role, a nonprofit organization, Pro Publica, will offer long-term projects to uncover misdeeds in government, business and organizations on an exclusive basis for newspapers, magazines or other media outlets.

To start, their offers won’t thrill thin-skinned editors. Bill Keller, executive editor of the New York Times, is quoted as being “open to using work from an outside source, assuming we were confident of its quality,” but adding that “we’ll always have a preference for work we can vouch for ourselves.”

Beyond that hurdle is the fact that the backers are Herbert and Marion Sandler, former chief executives of Golden West Financial Corporation, one of the nation’s largest mortgage lenders, who are major Democratic political donors and critics of President Bush.

Pro Publica will be staffed by distinguished journalists, but even so, how will it overcome the long-standing prejudice against outsourcing the search for truth along with the current climate of distrust over ulterior motives?

Over eighty years ago, in “Public Opinion,” Walter Lippmann wrote that journalism suffers from “the failure of self-governing people to transcend their casual experience and their prejudice by inventing, creating and organizing a machinery of knowledge.” He proposed that social institutions use reason and intelligence to “work by a steady light of their own” so that journalists could concentrate on amplifying and transmitting that light to the public.

Now we have machineries of knowledge, but their aim is to hide the truth. If the Sandlers want to use their money to remedy that, it might be better spent training motivated poor kids to become journalists with the now outdated ambition to do good rather than do well.

Media Mash-Up

While George Bush tells Old America his new plans for the plantation tonight, the Democrats will be engaging New America in cyberspace on the first candidate mash-up, a power-to-the-people event hatched in a Swiss Alps resort.

The President will be endorsing the proposals of Petraeus and Crocker, his overseers of the Iraq outpost, as Bill Maher badgers Barack Obama about the Ten Commandments.

Symbolically, unconnected citizens will be passively watching their TV sets as the electronic elite point and click to, in Arianna Huffington’s words, “take control of designing the debate you want to see--picking and choosing what issues you want to hear about and which candidates you want to hear from.”

Some citizens may find all this enlightenment too much to bear and go to bed early. Wake us when the media discovers an alternative to autocracy or anarchy.

President Gore, Lame Duck

Reading “Going After Gore” in the current Vanity Fair, another reminder of the disaster that befell the nation in November, 2000 and the media's share of the blame, prompts a re-posting of this what-if from last December:

As Al Gore faces his final years in the White House, history will view his two terms as disappointing.

After a razor-thin victory over George Bush in 2000, the new President was ultra-cautious.

Republicans labeled him “Al Bore” for failing to pursue a muscular foreign policy and for endless consultations with UN members, NATO allies, even potential adversaries such as North Korea and Iran.

Then he overreacted to such criticism, using an intelligence report in August, 2001, as pretext for striking defenseless camps in Afghanistan and Pakistan, arousing protests throughout the Middle East over the death of a populist leader, Osama bin Laden, and his followers.

Even more controversial was Gore’s expulsion of fifteen visitors from our ally, Saudi Arabia, for what Rush Limbaugh sarcastically termed “the heinous crime of taking flying lessons.”

The furor drove oil prices to $30 a barrel, with public protest bringing the President’s approval ratings down to 50 percent.

After that, Gore reverted to consensus by pushing for UN inspections in Iraq for weapons of mass destruction, which were never found. This diplomatic waffling, critics claim, diminished the U.S.’s standing in the world.

On the domestic front, the President refused to stimulate the economy with tax cuts, despite an ongoing budget surplus, and pushed for crippling limits on industrial emissions to reduce the so-called greenhouse effect.

Despite such gaffes, Gore narrowly won reelection in 2004 by reverting to Bill Clinton’s ploy of “It’s the economy, stupid.” His opponent, Steve Forbes, never managed to stir voters with his proposal of a flat income tax.

As 2008 approaches, the blandness of the Gore years may end. Vice-President Joe Lieberman, with a lock on the Democratic nomination, favors an aggressive American stance in the world. He will likely face George W. Bush, who claims Gore's election sent the country into a downward spiral.

A major issue will be terrorism which, relatively quiescent in eight years of diplomatic bumbling, may come to the fore again when a new President has America acting like a superpower again.

The question in 2008 will be: How do we let the rest of the world know we can no longer be pushed around?

Dow Jones Goes Down Under

The media melodrama is over. Apparently enough of the Bancroft family will accept Rupert Murdoch’s $5 billion Faustian bargain for the Wall Street Journal.

But give them credit for a struggle to save their souls. At a family meeting Monday night, the Journal reported, one of the matriarchs, 77-year-old Jane Cox MacElree, argued against making the deal with the Devil by invoking the martyrdom of Daniel Pearl.

"He put his life on the line for the paper," Ms. MacElree said, citing the reporter who was kidnapped and killed by Al Qaeda in Pakistan.

Ms. MacElree was supported by daughter, Leslie Hill, a Dow Jones director and former airline pilot, who waved a quarter-inch-thick manila envelope filled with letters from Journal reporters and editors who protested a deal with News Corp.

“She said it was their voices that mattered.” the Journal reported. “In a halting speech, she was on the verge of tears as she talked about the reporters' dedication to their jobs, and told family members they owed it to the Journal's rank and file not to sell the paper, according to participants.”

What’s remarkable about this prolonged struggle is not that the various branches of the Bancroft family finally succumbed to Murdoch’s offer that doubled the market value of their holdings but that so many resisted for so long.

In the era of corporate journalism, it’s sad to witness the loss of another leading family-owned company with the principles expressed by Ms. MacElree and her daughter, but there is a kind of cold comfort in seeing that such sentiments still exist.

Their time may have passed, but Murdoch’s won’t last forever, either.

D. C. Madam: More Discreet Than the Media

It’s easy to see now why Deborah Jeane Palfrey did so well in her chosen profession. She is a model of sensitivity.

When the so-called D. C. Madam decided to make her phone records available to journalists as a public service, Ms. Palfrey was too trusting and naïve to realize that media people don’t have the scruples of madams.

Sending out 54 discs to news organizations and bloggers, she insisted that the list not be published in its entirety. But Ms. Palfrey’s attorney says “we got calls and e-mails saying there wasn't any security on the coding and the numbers were going to be all over the place.”

Ms. Palfrey, “concerned about manipulation of the database with false and misleading information,” published the list on her own web site to maintain the integrity of her records.

Despite all her precautions, the repercussions have started. Republican Sen. David Vitter of Louisiana issued a statement last night apologizing for "a very serious sin in my past" after his telephone number appeared.

Ms. Palfrey seems befuddled by all the commotion, since she insists she operated a "legal, high-end erotic fantasy service" and that women who worked for her signed contracts in which they promised not to have sex with clients.

You just can’t trust anybody these days.

Fred Thompson's Brief Honeymoon

Media cycles are getting shorter. After weeks of blowing kisses at the unannounced candidate who is front-running in Republican polls, reporters are piling on.

Last week’s sighing over his track record with the ladies as a bachelor has turned into clucking over the drawbacks of having a “trophy wife.”

On one coast, the New York Times reports that Thompson’s supporters “have been wrestling with the public reaction to Jeri Kehn Thompson, whose youthfulness, permanent tan and bleached blond hair present a contrast to the 64-year-old man who hopes to win the hearts of the conservative core of the Republican party. Will the so-called values voters accept this union?”

On the other coast, the Los Angeles Times reveals that the former Senator-actor “accepted an assignment from a family-planning group to lobby the first Bush White House to ease a controversial abortion restriction.”

Suddenly, the earthy, straight-shooting country-boy candidate is being re-cast as a dirty old man who talks out of both sides of his mouth about the sacredness of unborn life.

Welcome to 21st century Presidential politics, Senator. After they love you to death, the harpies will turn on you. Ask John McCain about “media payback.”

But don’t be discouraged. The next cycle will undoubtedly be devoted to debunking some of the debunking.

Book-Contract Baksheesh

On the eve of another Rupert Murdoch mongoose act, this time swallowing the Wall Street Journal, he gets a review from the New York Times that required legwork by no less than four reporters and, in the end, reflects both shock and awe at the Australian who is eating the media world.

America’s “paper of record” narrates Murdoch’s unique skills at getting politicians to act as enablers in his addictive expansion of an information empire.

In addition to the time-honored methods, Murdoch has perfected new variations for buying them, not least of which is bribery by book advance.

As Congress was preparing to redraw the media ownership rules, Murdoch’s book publishing arm, HarperCollins, gave House Speaker Newt Gingrich a $4.5 million contract. In the Senate, Trent Lott got a $250,000 advance for a memoir.

Other Senators came at bargain prices. Arlen Specter, received $24,506 for “Passion for Truth,” Kay Bailey Hutchison $141,666 for “American Heroines.” Chuck Hagel has a book deal for next year.

Unless things have changed drastically since my time as a publisher, books by politicians, unless they involve scandal, are not best-sellers. Trent Lott’s quarter-of-a-million-dollar tome sold 12,000 copies.

But Murdoch got his money’s worth, as he no doubt will from the $1 million advance to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.

Book publishing is an odd business that has never been just about money.