I gotta face facts, here: I'm memorialed out. To whom are we paying homage this week? I forget. For the life of me, I seem to recall watching, over and over the past few days, AEG video soundbites of Ted Kennedy's last rehearsal at Staples Center. That can't be right.

All this confusion is the price of overindulged sober reflection. As far as paying respects, I'm running a deficit.

Guess I'll just wait for the media to guide me to the next emotional signpost - the next train wreck, solemn passing or roadkill-starlet meltdown that will occupy, for far too long a time, our shabbily corrupted attention.

And as we know from the past decade, that can be dangerous.

There's an overarching problem with boiling down real life into teary soap opera or stirring anthem: All the facts presented us, the ones that seem to fit together so comfortably, generally turn out to be false - stumblebum errors or dementedly calculating lies.

Look at the recent job by Reuters and the Associated Press smearing outgoing IAEA chief Mohammad ElBaradei , evidently to discredit the November 2007 U.S. National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran's nuclear program, which concluded that Iran had ended work on nuclear weapons in 2003. And, by the way, the "quartet of countries" is, unsurprisingly to anyone following the slime trails criss-crossing international Mideast policy, the United States, Britain, France, and Germany - now and evidently evermore Israel's best friends west of Tyre.:

Reflecting the hostile attitude of the quartet of Western governments and Israel toward ElBaradei, the stories suggested that ElBaradei has been guilty of a cover-up in refusing to publish information he has had since last September alleging that Iran has continued to pursue research on developing nuclear weapons. (The Reuters story) referred without further analysis to U.S. and Israeli accusations that ElBaradei has deliberately underplayed the case against Iran to "undermine the U.S. sanctions drive." (AP) explained ElBaradei's refusal to publish the intelligence summary as the result of his eagerness to "avoid moves that could harden already massive Iranian intransigence on cooperating with the agency" and his worry that it would increase the chances of a U.S. or Israeli strike on Tehran's nuclear sites... (The story) also suggested ElBaradei had made "barely disguised criticisms of U.S. policy" in the past and that some of his statements on Israel and Gaza were viewed by the West as "overtly political."

In fact, however, the tensions between ElBaradei and the George W. Bush administration were directly related to ElBaradei's public declaration in March 2003 that the documents on alleged Iraqi efforts to obtain uranium from Niger - later known as the "Niger forgeries" - were not authentic, after he received no response from Washington to an earlier private warning to the White House... (Reuters) quoted a "senior Western diplomat" as confirming that some of the information the four Western countries want published in the coming IAEA report relate to intelligence documents concerning an alleged Iranian nuclear weapons research program, which the IAEA has referred to as "alleged studies." What the anti-ElBaradei coalition is now demanding, as (Reuter's) report confirms, is that ElBaradei attach a report prepared by the IAEA safeguards department, which reflects the slant of the quartet and Israel on the issue, as an "annex" to the coming report.

Value of this "annex", of course, wasn't enhanced when new evidence came to light late last year suggesting that some of its key documents were fabricated or doctored to support the accusation that Iran was working on nuclear weapons.

If all this reeks to high heaven of the above-mentioned "Niger forgeries", it should, since the relentless "interests" trying to salt legitimate analysis of Iran's nuclear research must be at least inspired by successful fictions in 2002 that Iraq was working on weapons of mass destruction.

The routine of leaking tidbits to the press to burnish credibility of specious information, and then using published accounts to spin support for hammering Iran with draconian sanctions if not outright war, can only work, as it did with Iraq seven years ago, if the press cooperates by passing on to us such doctored crap... if our once-treasured fifth estate is eager to gerry rig such nonsense into casus belli. Sometimes, in its enthusiasm, this obsequious ass-kissing trips over itself:

"Iran's stonewalling of the agency on increased monitoring," (AP reporter George Jahn) wrote, "has raised agency concerns that its experts might not be able to make sure that some of the enriched material produced at Natanz is not diverted for potential weapons use." Unfortunately for that argument, however, IAEA officials revealed Aug. 20 that Iran had already agreed the previous week to allow increased IAEA monitoring of the Natanz enrichment facility through additional cameras.

According to Gareth Porter, this seedy - and dangerous - interplay between official policy and cooperative coverage shows "how news stories based on leaks from officials with a decided agenda, without any serious effort to provide an objective historical text or investigation of their accuracy, can seriously distort an issue."

Why would we support such unreliable journalism with our private patronage? And how on earth could we bring ourselves to actually prop up the lying bastards with the public dole?

Given the looky-see / looky-do dynamic of our social flow chart today, we can expect to hear a lot more bullshit - all exuberantly positive in tone - about media bailout proposals. For those of you first hearing about this admittedly harebrained idea, please, stop laughing a moment. There's a serious downside to this.

David Lloyd George, Britain's Prime Minister during the Great War, once observed that "credibility is like virginity - once gone, it's never recovered." For the past couple of decades, our news media has been squandering its credibility like oil wildcatters once threw away money in Panhandle whorehouses. The new business-management school of "everything above a bottom line is malleable" pitches tone and presentation of news to favor those who own the American information industry, and everyone else in the elite trust in which they circulate. 

Remember President Reagan's long press "honeymoon"? Remember when it ended? What's that? Iran-Contra? Nope. The savings and loan meltdown? Good! But... no. The honeymoon never ended. Reagan represented everything the ownership class wanted in a president: An approach to them and their interests so laissez faire our regulatory agencies, rules and laws might as well have been banished to Jupiter. From 1980 on, and especially during the sorry tenure of our last chief executive, the business of America is giving us the business.

A wonderfully infuriating example of this press-as-court-bard lickspittle is an article in the Los Angeles Times this week which practically chortles in glee sounding the death knell of the healthcare public option, and rubbing our nose in the windfall for insurance companies portended by federal mandates that will force us to pay for private health insurance - our frail household budgets be damned:

Lashed by liberals and threatened with more government regulation, the insurance industry nevertheless rallied its lobbying and grass-roots resources so successfully in the early stages of the healthcare overhaul deliberations that it is poised to reap a financial windfall.

The half-dozen leading overhaul proposals circulating in Congress would require all citizens to have health insurance, which would guarantee insurers tens of millions of new customers - many of whom would get government subsidies to help pay the companies' premiums.

"It's a bonanza," said Robert Laszewski, a health insurance executive for 20 years who now tracks reform legislation as president of the consulting firm Health Policy and Strategy Associates Inc.

If we lose the public option - the only substantive, meaningful change in this year's health care "reform" package - at least part of the blame must go the the cheerleaders who helped transform a public safety net into a private-industry sieve to filtrate more pelf from our pockets. 

Information today is shaped and shaded to suit the perspectives of corner offices in upper suites, and this approach led to a rabid rewrite of reality surrounding us in the aftermath of 9/11. Opportunity had knocked, our blood was up, and the nation was steered to all sorts of counterintuitive crusades, helped along by carefully sculpted facts and figures. We were told Saddam was looking for uranium in Africa. We were told he was behind attacks on September 11. Mushroom clouds. Killer drones. Look out! Up is down. Night is day! Attack!

...All of it constantly repeated, in droning monotony, news cycle upon 24-hour news cycle.

It was the epitome of hubris - or stupidity - not to anticipate repercussions when it was revealed we'd been led to war with a pack of lies. The last draw was last year, when the economic meltdown carromed in on us without a peep of warning from the business press. Viewership of cable channels and readership of our flagship newspapers have collapsed through the floor. Old-line dailies - for now mostly in medium-sized cities - are closing up shop. This is not a happy circumstance. Newspeople, after all, tell us how the world has turned while we are busy living our lives; they tell us what our government is doing with our tax money, they tell us how it's misspent, they tell us why we have no jobs, and where we can go to land them. They tell us why we're trapped in wars for which there are no apparent reasons to fight.

Or... they should. That the American media has failed so miserably in its operative compact with us is the main reason for its commerical erosion. Simply: People don't trust what they're told, anymore. They don't trust the professional press.

So, of course the media will turn to government, to taxpayer money to keep itself alive. Didn't the banks?

Now comes the downside I mentioned above, because this "bailout" won't come in a cash lump, TARP-like, but in "silent-partner" intiatives favoring establishment media - and delimiting alternative information souces like... well... this site. In a beautifully perceptive piece this week, Justin Raimondo disarticulates this absurd hogwash:

This ominous development ought to scare the pants off of anyone concerned with the maintenance of a free society - and the continued existence of dissent in an increasingly conformist profession where "journalists" are often reduced to the status of mere stenographers as they eagerly communicate to the masses the words, wishes, wit, and wisdom of government officials...

So what this means is that the Old Journalism is going to deploy an agency of the federal government to regulate the industry in order to save these tired old dinosaurs who don't deserve to survive in the first place. They'll use every weapon in the government's arsenal to do it: antitrust laws (watch out, Craigslist!), copyright laws (forget about linking to an Associated Press story: that's copyright infringement!), and "tax policy" - if we can't get them by hook or by crook, we'll just tax the New Media to death. That'll teach them to respect their elders!

Seems the Federal Trade Commission has scheduled workshops for the end of this year to look into how their buddies in the "don't blow my cover" sector can be rescued. In an age when more and more of what Joan Didion called the vast, inescapable ganglia of our information system is held by fewer and fewer key players - Time-Warner, Viacom, etc. - will we see installed a kind of genteel-Pravda system of officially recognized "news" media, and, far from the flag pole, put-upon, outlaw scalawags?

The American press always has gravitated to money and power. Todd Gitlin once responded to a comment of mine at this site by pointing out Watergate coverage and press heroics of decades ago were exceptions to this rule. But even that phenomenon was "loaded": Nixon was a detested enemy of the Eastern establishment liberal elite, and that camp had the power and resources to bring him down, not as a revolutionary act guided by principle, but as part of political internecine warfare which affected for better or worse the common American little, if at all.

Social standing and connections lead to good press in a system utterly detached from anything anyone tooting air less-rarified would call "right" or "wrong". Mother Jones may not be on the FTC's protected species list, but it sure can haul into the light a media bauble like Fiji Water, the bottled miracle juice with almost supernatural qualities (it possesses, in its fashionably square plastic jug, "known and significant abilities of 'Holy Healing Waters' in Lourdes, France or Fatima, Portugal" burbles a company newsletter). However: 

Nowhere in Fiji Water's glossy marketing materials will you find reference to the typhoid outbreaks that plague Fijians because of the island's faulty water supplies; the corporate entities that Fiji Water has - despite the owners' talk of financial transparency - set up in tax havens like the Cayman Islands and Luxembourg; or the fact that its signature bottle is made from Chinese plastic in a diesel-fueled plant and hauled thousands of miles to its ecoconscious consumers. And, of course, you won't find mention of the military junta for which Fiji Water is a major source of global recognition and legitimacy.

Now, see, that's the kind of disreputable, upstart gossip-mongering the Beautiful People can do without. Fiji's owners line the right political pockets. They are "above-suspicion rich". Dammit, they're friends with Ariana Huffington!

And this is the kind of envy-driven backbiting with which we shouldn't trouble our silly little heads.