As with many other things, Bill Clinton was the great exception. He was a tabloid president long before his presidency hit the tabloids. Say what you will about him, he was never dull, and that saved him during the impeachment foolishness as much as anything else did. Suddenly, for the first time since conservatism reconstituted itself under Ronald Reagan, it was the ascendant right that looked like the national schoolmarms. Clinton, bless his black and mischievous heart, was too good a show to cancel, particularly at the hands of a passel of foul-tempered theocrats who clearly didn't get the joke. These, of course, were natural advantages not available subsequently to sad, earnest Albert Gore. Someday, somehow, Bill Clinton will take a paycheck from Rupert Murdoch. They were made for each other, if only as subtext.

Murdoch was perfectly positioned to take advantage of the conservative capture of the tabloid soul. He'd never lost touch with it in the first place, and the culture that he creates within his various enterprises is one in which the most egregious of capital sins is not necessarily to be liberal, it is to be dull. After all, it was within Murdoch's News Corporation that Michael Moore's "TV Nation" found its last home, both Bart Simpson and Fox Mulder found their voices, and the Village Voice briefly found itself with a blessedly absentee landlord.

The tabloid heart and the renegade soul of any Murdoch operation is in its upper management. He has a gift for finding talented eccentrics like David Hill, the brilliant telecaster who runs Fox Sports and who has been known to hold staff meetings at Buddy Guy's joint in Chicago. My editor at the Herald was a Fleet Street emigré named Ken Chandler who referred to me, regularly, and never without a smile, as "my Communist sports columnist."

There is a sense always that the shop is a small one, run locally, and not merely the distant appendage of a faceless conglomerate. It's not entirely dissimilar to the "mate-ism" that runs through all of Australian society, and it's so cheerily cultivated within the News Corporation that even people like me occasionally lose sight of the fact that Murdoch's labor history resides somewhere on the dark side of the Harlan County War.

You can see it all come to vivid life, especially, in the general ambiance of the Fox News Channel, which suddenly has become the subject of much huffing due to its success at carving off the largest smidgen of a slice of a segment of a portion of the overall cable TV audience. Granted, Brit Hume is as stiff as a board, and Tony Snow has the wit and charisma of a lawn ornament. Nevertheless, the whole FNC operation is loose and free and easy to watch, engaging as hell, and not wholly because it's so secure in its conservatism.

It's because, like any good Murdoch operation, it has found an "elite" that it is not, and that it can rebel against. FNC's primary definition of itself is that it is Not CNN. (To a lesser extent, it is Not CBS, NBC or ABC, either, but CNN is clearly the primary target of opportunity.) This is only partly about ideology -- about the notion of CNN as a leftist vanguard, which I think even the Fox people would admit was dubious at best. It's mostly about CNN being stodgy and boring. It's about CNN being un-tabloid in the extreme.

Look at CNN, as it tried to change, to adapt, to get in touch with the tabloid soul. Walter Isaacson went courting Tom Delay on Capitol Hill and he ended up convincing no one and looking ludicrous. CNN -- and now MSNBC, with its uninspired, and so far wildly unsuccessful, resuscitation of Phil Donahue's career -- tried to replicate Fox's nighttime chat lineup, and we've wound up with TV shows that are the equivalent of watching your 50-year-old uncle dance the frug at a family wedding. CNN can't do what Fox does because the corporate culture of AOL Time Warner -- with dour old Henry Luce still glowering down like the Bad Fairy -- is so different from the one that produced Fox News, and the one that has produced, over the last few years, the very living embodiment of the Murdoch ethos, as perfect a specimen of his culture as Lucy was of the people who threw rocks at each other across Olduvai Gorge.

In other words: CNN could never have produced Bill O'Reilly.

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