Well, you should've seen the crowd in Foley's explode. We'd brought the Establishment to its knees, man. Beer flowed. Strong men wept. I rejoined as the party was hitting high tide, and I vividly recall singing "The Internationale" at top volume. Someone else yelled, "Give us Barabbas!" for no good reason I could ever determine. Some guys from the Boston Globe showed up to commiserate and, transported by the news, one of my colleagues celebrated by repeatedly biting one of the Globe guys on the shoulder. He was amiably nonplused, but bought a round anyway.

And, of course, several months later, when nobody was looking, and when we were all back in Foley's, bitching about our salaries again, Rupert greased the skids in Washington, and got to keep both the TV station and the newspaper anyway.

That's how he does it. That's how he signs you aboard, like Ahab splicing hands with the crew. In his essential biography of Murdoch, William Shawcross quotes him saying, "A press that fails to interest the whole community is one that will ultimately become the house organ of the elite." Shawcross also recalls an interview in which Murdoch memorably flummoxed Barbara Walters by pointing out that, since Shakespeare wrote for the masses, if the Bard were alive that day, he'd be turning out scripts for "Dallas."

And his great gift as a mogul is how he brilliantly targets -- for himself and for us -- members of an elite to which even a billionaire like Rupert Murdoch can never belong. (Joe Kennedy, it should be recalled, performed a similar self-hypnosis concerning the people who ran Harvard University -- largely to ensure that his sons could get in there.) Shrewdly dressed in ragamuffin's clothes, Murdoch sizes up the gentleman's profession that journalism has become, and then looks deeply into the reporter's secret heart and sees the guilt festering there.

It's all nonsense, of course. Murdoch is no more interested in running a truly alternative press than he is in joining the Carthusians. But it's enormously seductive nonsense, partly because there is no little truth embedded in it. We actually do have a kept press today, enthralled by the political and social elites. It's completely lost that sense of being a craft apart from those institutions on which it reports. Friendships with sources are no longer a thing of which to be wary, and access has become a kind of genteel corruption. Taken all in all, it's become an upscale whorehouse with an unusual number of piano players.

Not here, says the Murdoch ethos. Here is where you can come and be raffish and bold and cynical. Here there are no friends, just grist for the mill. Write your bold treatises on the degradation of American popular culture, and don't be worried at all that your check comes from an unusually successful Australian tits-and-bum merchant. You are unbowed and unbought.

Forget the owner of the place, it says, with his television networks and his satellite deals, and the NFL and NASCAR, and all the politicians that he has in his pocket. Forget the fact that his politics are retrograde and his appetites apparently limitless. (Forget even that he gave a couple of million to Al Gore, too, just in case.) Pay no attention to the man behind the golden curtain, it says. Here's a place where you can still spit on the floor. It is not to be underestimated. After all, this culture gave us Bill O'Reilly, but it gave us the Simpsons, too. It got me to boo Ted Kennedy and mean it.

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"Every tabloid, as soon as it gets into safe waters, begins to grow intellectual." -- H.L. Mencken.

The tabloid sensibility is not a matter of ideology. It's a matter of volume. In the true tabloid mind, there is no right or left. There's only bombastic or boring. Some time after the end of the 1960s, the American left lost touch with its tabloid voice. Trailing behind, through a media age in which everything reshaped itself as entertainment, the Democrats became earnest and plodding and irredeemably dull. With very few exceptions -- Barney Frank knows how to be a tabloid pol as well as anyone does -- they became a party of chaperones. What they represented was big, but it was never powerful.

At the same time, energized by their most conservative members, the Republicans used the tabloid mind's various modern manifestations -- talk radio, for example, and the rise of the Internet -- to create elites against which they themselves could rebel. They were so far in front of the Democrats on this that the Democrats not only lost touch with the tabloid sensibility, they lost touch with the people to whom it most appealed, a great many of whom had been the party's traditional constituencies.

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