On Fox these days, it's all Natalee Holloway, all the time, with breaks for "news alerts" about shark attacks. Probably the only thing that could have knocked the young woman who went missing in Aruba off the Fox air was a speech by Bush, and it did. Fox dragged itself away from Holloway long enough on Tuesday to preview the president's prime-time speech, trotting out the usual "expert" ostriches who intoned through mouthfuls of sand that only a "steadfast message" would calm the markets and the country, as well as a long-haired right-winger in the Ted Nugent mold who informed us that the Allies had to fight Nazi terrorists after the end of World War II for 10 years. With its usual reverence, Fox also covered Bush's speech itself, an utterly insignificant offering that seemed to have been spliced together from earlier "inspiring" Bush sound bites. Bush sought to rally support for the increasingly disastrous war by saying we had to fight the terrorists "where they are making their stand" -- leaving out the inconvenient fact that they were not there before he invaded. His halftime locker-room address may have been intended to recall the steely resolve of Winston Churchill's famous "We shall never surrender" speech, but for students of military history it may instead have summoned the words of Adolf Hitler, who proclaimed to the commander of his doomed troops in Stalingrad, "Where the soldier of Germany sets foot, there he remains."

But Fox's all-consuming interest is in the Holloway case, upon whose resolution the fate of the republic apparently rests. Tuesday, a short news segment opened with a live report from that epicenter of world news, Aruba, with a grim-looking reporter standing on the beach, intoning something ominous about Holloway. On Monday, its news programming was even more dominated by Holloway (a highlight was when Geraldo Rivera suggested putting military pressure on the Dutch marines to help find her body) and lovingly detailed accounts of the gory Florida shark attacks. John Gibson opened his "The Big Story" show by intoning, "This is a Fox News alert" -- then proceeded to inform his viewers of the urgent news that a boy who was attacked by a shark had his leg amputated, before going on to interview a shark expert. The contrast between Fox's resolute avoidance of showing bloody images from the war in Iraq and its nearly pornographic immersion in shark bites and unsolved murders, was glaring. Only death or bloodshed with high entertainment value gets on Fox.

In this context, it was remarkable that Fox host Neil Cavuto was able to maintain a straight face when he asked oilman T. Boone Pickens, "Does it trouble you the way the war is presented in the media?" -- a question so embarrassingly Jeff Gannon-esque that even Pickens retorted, "That's a loaded question." There's no problem with such "liberal media" bias at Fox: If it doesn't like the way the war is going, it just doesn't cover it. (Bush and Fox always sing from the same hymnal. In a not-so-subtle passage in his speech, Bush implicitly chastised news outlets for running images of bombings in Iraq, saying the insurgents carry them out "for the cameras.")

If Fox had not been such an ardent supporter of the war, its tabloid wallowing might be merely irritating. As it is, it's disgusting -- the contrast between Fox's earlier moralizing and its current pandering feels debased, almost depraved. Fox has not lived up to the war it demanded, and it's hard to believe that even supporters of the war aren't offended by this. But for today's right wing, including those blowhards who make careers out of decrying "the death of outrage" and the loss of Victorian virtues and other sins for which liberal "relativism" and "moral cowardice" are responsible, the idea that war should be covered with dignity and seriousness is as quaint as the Geneva Conventions: What matters is propaganda, effectiveness. If you want to win a war, and it's going badly, and its continued prosecution (or the political effectiveness of the president) depends upon the opinion of the American people, then you don't cover it, or you whitewash it. Hence the violent anger, in some conservative quarters, at the "Nightline" programs that showed the U.S. dead in Iraq. That the ultimate act of disrespect for the dead is to ignore them apparently does not matter.

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