One fascinating element of the election in general and last night’s primary coverage in particular is the saga of how the American press - once the standard for news-gathering institutions everywhere, once the fearless champion of social crusades and Watergate revelations – has become so ingrown, so irrelevant, so corrupt.

American media is today little more than a flack operation for the power elites, selling us armed intervention abroad and gummy, obsolete, kiss-ass social programs here at home. Throughout this corrupt mutation, the mainstream media has managed to cosset itself in a snotty cocoon of arrogance, fostering in itself and attempting to instill in the rest of us the grandiose delusion that the fifth estate is the master interpreter of all reality – indeed, the fabricator of reality itself (whenever truth becomes… inconvenient).

The media’s crisis is not so much that it is detached from its audience (it has) – but that it has detached itself from the real world.

And no news outlet so epitomizes this decay more than Fox News.
 
One advantage to Rupert Murdoch and his gutter-spawn empire: If we want to know what the neoconservatives are thinking (and maybe setting us up for), we can watch Fox News. Albeit from a entry-level, wannabe-ass-kicker perspective, the network functions as a 24/7 fireside chat from the air-breathing detritus calling shots inside the Beltway.
 
Here’s the mission in three little words: fear more fear. Anytime News Corp. has the uneasy impression that Americans may regain their senses, it fills its airwaves with breathless folktales about World War V, anthrax Coke, mushroom clouds and churlish mammals in grandma’s panty drawer. When its spunky pundits aren’t hot on the trail of phantom Islamofascists – or, more likely, shoeless-joe-wino “terror cells” - we get an endless play-by-play of Britney’s awkwardness handling sippy cups.
 
And the lineup… the lineup:
 
Where the hell did they dig up Sean Hannity? He’s the Leo Gorcey of the Far Right – comical non sequiturs and stumblebum delivery soured only by a sinister, repellent nature common to brute sociopaths. His one distinguishing characteristic is that he’s the only guy in television dumber than Glenn Beck. Next up is Geraldo Rivera. Well… let’s see… Geraldo’s made a decades-long career out of mustache wax and a troublesome tendency to careen into one self-triggered catastrophe after another. He burrows into Al Capone’s vaults… then apologizes to viewers for piddling away two precious hours of their lives dredging up a mountain of rubble and some old pop bottles. He helps legitimize the hideous Satanic Ritual Abuse travesty… then makes on-air amends for his part in crushing the lives and families involved. He and Bill O’Reilly erupt in a screeching bitch-out… then kiss and make up. Through it all, Geraldo maintains his chip-on-the-shoulder, “macho de newsman” preen. He seems to invoke a kind of Universal Bedwetter’s Prerogative: As long as he apologizes for a mess he’s made, he MUST be forgiven.
 
And then there’s O’Reilly himself. Wow. What about Bill O’Reilly? If karma truly was the gentle guidepost of the cosmos, this dunderhead would be chewing up his own cardboard bedding in a lab-rat cage. Admittedly, his nightly “I, Dumb-Ass” manifestoes are bracing in a whorehouse-philosophy sort of way. But then he rips into teenage sexual abuse victims, gives his cold-reading imprimatur to every scrap of Likud Party propaganda skittering across his desk, creepily wishbones sleazy sex stories… He… exists. O’Reilly is the degraded, terminal species of TV talking head - a shriveled evolutionary vestige slipping off the ass-crack of broadcasting.
 
Fox News and its parent company helped mutate the news business into what it is today. Instead of observable fact, we get spin. Instead of reporting, we get chit-chat. We can no longer make our own decisions based on information provided us. We must be bombarded with the corrupt interpretations of self-proclaimed “experts”. Reality is, after all, whatever our masters say it is.
 
Not that Fox News lacks junk-food returns. I mean, full disclosure: If Anna Nicole’s saintly, white-trash visage appears shrine-like on a Denny’s sneeze guard, dammit, I wanna know. But news-as-propaganda is a key component of the new American Imperium that has brought this country its greatest strategic disaster abroad and disintegrating civil liberties at home. We have regressed to a politically primeval state - a spiteful banana republic gunned up with nuclear hardware. We are an international drive-by waiting to happen. How very fashionable. How very new millennium. How very… Fox News.
 
Thanks, Rupert. Thanks, guys.