Frank Rich’s book, The Greatest Story Ever Sold: The Decline and Fall of Truth from 9/11 to Katrina is reviewed in the NYT Sunday Book review today. The review contains ironic material like,

The Republicans, being more populist than the Democrats, have exploited this new climate with far greater finesse. Accusing the media of bias is an act of remarkable chutzpah for an administration that pitches its messages straight at radio talk show hosts and public relations men. Rich gives many examples. One of the more arresting ones is of Dick Cheney appearing on a TV show with Armstrong Williams, a fake journalist on the government payroll, to complain about bias in the press. Something has gone askew when one of the most trusted critics of the Bush administration is Jon Stewart, host of a superb comedy program. It was on his “Daily Show” that Rob Corddry, an actor playing a reporter, lamented that he couldn’t keep up with the government, which had created “a whole new category of fake news — infoganda.” Rich is right: “The more real journalism fumbled its job, the easier it was for such government infoganda to fill the vacuum.”

Unafraid of cannibalizing his brand, Rich has a column in the NYT today titled “The Longer the War, the Larger the Lies.” The column is behind the Times’ bizarre paid subscription firewall, but it can be found here, at truthout.com, for free. From the right to the left, from the Wall Street Journal to the New York Times, an echo chamber effect is reinforced by these dubious pay-for-access revenue models. but that’s a rant for a different day. For today, let’s just relish this (with thanks to truthout for the syndication):

The untruths are flying so fast that untangling them can be a full-time job. Maybe that’s why I am beginning to find Dick Cheney almost refreshing. As we saw on “Meet the Press” last Sunday, these days he helpfully signals when he’s about to lie. One dead giveaway is the word context, as in “the context in which I made that statement last year.” The vice president invoked “context” to try to explain away both his bogus predictions: that Americans would be greeted as liberators in Iraq and that the insurgency (some 15 months ago) was in its “last throes.”

The other instant tip-off to a Cheney lie is any variation on the phrase “I haven’t read the story.” He told Tim Russert he hadn’t read The Washington Post’s front-page report that the bin Laden trail had gone “stone cold” or the new Senate Intelligence Committee report(PDF) contradicting the White House’s prewar hype about nonexistent links between Al Qaeda and Saddam. Nor had he read a Times front-page article about his declining clout. Or the finding by Mohamed ElBaradei of the International Atomic Energy Agency just before the war that there was “no evidence of resumed nuclear activities” in Iraq. “I haven’t looked at it; I’d have to go back and look at it again,” he said, however nonsensically.

Jason Leopold, a respected professional journalist, wrote this weekend that an indictment had been issued in the case of just about everybody versus Karl Rove. The Wall Street Journal attacked the reportage implying that Leopold was, after all, only a blogger. Readers were expected to infer that Leopold was no longer respectable nor a reporter based on a quote from Jay Rosen, “a blogger himself.” Now a strict deconstruction and untangling will show that the WSJ servants of capital and corporate greed didn’t actually conflate Leopold’s reporting with bloggaciousness. Instead they relied on a combination of squirrelly editing and/or poor writing to let the reader draw his own conclusions:

Mr. Leopold previously worked for a number of mainstream news organizations.

“The system for keeping unverifiable reports out of the news is totally broken down when you look at the online world,” says Jay Rosen, a professor of journalism at New York University and a blogger himself at www.pressthink.org. Instead, he says, there is a “let’s see if this holds up” philosophy that he thinks has merit in today’s fast-paced news world, though he admits it isn’t a practice that major news organizations could or should adopt.

Truthout operates on a shoestring, and isn’t what you’d call a capital intensive web publication, but by god their reporting has been practically the only consistently truthful investigative work on-shore since the Bush administration gave American mainstream journalism a hot shot of anthrax in its bindle. Contributions are welcome!

Leopold reported that the indictment had been handed down and that the prosecutor had talked with Rove’s attorney. Rove’s attorney, Luskin, claims to have been off somewhere cutting brush or fishing for jumbo perch or something. Leopold reminds us that Luskin is a liar, and points out that mainstream media would do well to view skeptically any reports from the pathological creatures that crawl the halls of the current administration looking for spiders and rodents on which to feed.

When I read about the indictment and the lengthy conference with the defendant’s attorney, it seemed clear to me that they were cooking something up. Since the indictment, Rove has been free to deliver a talk to the American Enterprise Institute (”Most people don’t understand that we’re doing a heck of a… job”), and the Preznit has sent troops to guard the Mexican border. The dog is wagging big-time.

So who is staying out of jail and how? Certainly I trust Jason Leopold more than Karl Rove, Dick Cheney, or even the Preznit (who, after all, did lie about the size of a fish he caught in his little mud hole down in Texas). My sense is that the grand jury came in with a raft of indictments, indictments so broad and deep that the Preznit has declared that they constitute a threat to national security. Now while it is the Preznit’s right to jail Leopold and Fitzgerald, and to hold them incommunicado in this time of war; I suspect rather that he put a national security blockade on the information related to the indictments. That way, the American people can be protected from any knowledge that a grand jury thinks Rove and Cheney should go to trial. If there is a trial, it will be a secret one, and if a jail term is handed down, it will be a secret jail term.

I will feel — we all will feel much better not knowing that the felons in charge have been caught and punished.  In time of war, good news is what’s important, not muck-raking political nonsense.