You can't quite imagine reading this saga in The Wall Street Journal while owner Rupert Murdoch was still married to Wendi Deng Murdoch, with whom he broke up amid his reported belief that she’d carried on with others, notably former British Prime Minister Tony Blair. In case you’re late to this tabloid delight, Vanity Fair detailed it all here in 2014.

But, incredibly, the notion of her as handmaiden to the totalitarians in Beijing is now found in the Journal: “U.S. counterintelligence officials in early 2017 warned Jared Kushner, President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser, that Wendi Deng Murdoch, a prominent Chinese-American businesswoman, could be using her close friendship with Mr. Kushner and his wife, Ivanka Trump, to further the interests of the Chinese government, according to people familiar with the matter.”

The intrigue turns on a planned $100 million Chinese garden at the National Arboretum. It was deemed a security risk “because it included a 70-foot-tall white tower that could potentially be used for surveillance.” Yes, surveillance in a garden “planned on one of the higher patches of land near downtown Washington, less than 5 miles from both the Capitol and the White House.” Who would have thought a seemingly serene combo of ponds, rocks, flowers and trees might not be quite as inviting as one figured?

Yes, this Kushner-Murdoch tale may actually divert your attention from the adjacent saga, “Platinum, Clinging to its Status as a Top Precious Metal, Faces a Crisis.”

Facebook proves journalism is an annoyance as it kills it for a third time

Amid the media's growing angst and self-inflicted wounds, it now reports with B-movie melodrama about Mark Zuckerberg's latest strategy for Facebook's News Feed. In sum: Sorry, media, you can't rely on me to resuscitate your audiences.

But the best exegesis comes from Parisian journalist-entrepreneur Frederic Filloux in his regular online column called Monday Note, about digital media, where he bluntly opens, "For Facebook, journalism has been a pain in the neck from day one. Now, bogged down with the insoluble problems of fake news and bad PR, it’s clear that Facebook will gradually pull the plug on news. Publishers should stop whining and move on."

Journalism i.e news, will appear lower down on one's Facebook news feed than stuff from friends, family and "groups," whatever that means. News does "share" well,compared to stuff from friends and family, and it presents likely expenses in hiring people to help monitor misinformation (of course, it could contract out to smart people to do that and cut down on all those pricy HR realities like benefits).

Further, it's caused lots of public relations problems for Facebook, such as when it deleted the Napalm Girl Vietnam War photo from a Norwegian newspaper's feed. And, well, news can be a downer compared to the upbeat, boorish, emotive stuff that has made Zuckerberg a zillionaire.

Filloux, who'll be heading to Stanford University at week's end (he's been a senior research fellow this year), is among those who firmly believe that publishers cannot outsource technology, audience acquisition and monetization to third parties. It's a view that reflects what's been, as a friend of mine puts it, "an asymmetrical bargain heavily favoring the Dynamic Duopoly," namely Google and Facebook. Now reporters detail Facebook's about-face against the backdrop of many of their own bosses paying the price for lack of imagination and initiative.

They are all operating from an ever-weaker financial and competitive position---and against a headwind of Trump-fueled public distrust. It provides a backdrop as Filloux argues that Facebook has "killed" the news media three times already. First, it undermined the notion of brand as increasing numbers of consumers can't really recall where their news actually came from ("I saw this thing the other day, from somewhere, about Trump and a giraffe and..."). Second, the power of authorship is vanishing as few have a clue who actually created something.