Posted 7:47 PM by Gene

Remember Jayson Blair? Fired from the New York Times because all his stories filed from Tuscaloosa and Pocatello were actually written in his bedsit with a bit of local colour lifted from the internet? What exactly did he do wrong? He copied what everybody else was saying, and it was mostly true and he saved a bundle on expenses.

On the other hand, media organisations spent a fortune sending vast teams halfway across the world to Baghdad to come back with a news event that never happened, and then paid their heavyweight commentators even more dough to amplify the hogwash. I mean, in what way is Simon Jenkins's column* any less risible than that Iraqi information minister announcing that the American aggressors' stomachs are now being roasted in hell? And which ought to be the greater media embarrassment - the sacking of Jayson Blair or the non-sacking of the Baghdad Museum?

Good question, Mark Steyn!

*This hack wrote of "...the destruction of the greatest treasure from the oldest age of Western civilisation, the greatest heritage catastrophe since the Second World War. We who claim to crusade for civilised values could not summon one tank to defend their earliest repository..." Or as Mr. Steyn says, "Etc., etc."

Posted 6:59 PM by Gene

Looks like the news hacks are back to pound-the-table pound-the-table POUND-THE-TABLE mode, and if the object of their affection doesn't happen to own one of the best search engines and one of the worst Weblog services.

Think we can blow up a second bubble?

Posted 4:45 PM by Gene

Well look who's leading the Open? POLITICALLY INCORRECT!

If only Howell were still alive.

Posted 2:48 PM by Gene

It appears that, given Friday's B.O. numbers (see #3 and #4), marketing may only go so far. And is that hissing sound the air coming out of Harrison Ford's career?

Posted 2:25 PM by Gene

So Max, are right-wing Republicans a hand grenade?

Posted 2:23 PM by Gene

Stories like this make you work extra-hard to discern the motive, and motive you can be sure they have. Do they run as form of mea culpa? As a kind of disclaimer? As a fig leaf to use in legal actions? As a grudging repsonse to the homicidal hatred more and more people have toward megamedia? Even if this story's motive is pure, we must view it as dishonest. How does that kind of overtime thinking help you news hacks?

Posted 2:09 PM by Gene

I am convinced the LALA Times has a whole department devoted to rock navel-staring, and its favorite word is DARK.

Posted 2:07 PM by Gene

What do the Saudis do with them after they're arrested?

Posted 8:31 AM by Gene

In the ideological pretzel factory of jaysonism, a hack named Rutten decides that Walter Duranty was "a bottom-feeder," "BUT",

the Times has forthrightly confronted its institutional complicity, most recently in the 150th anniversary issue it published two years ago. In that same issue, former Times Executive Editor Max Frankel commented at length and with equal candor on what he called "the century's bitterest journalistic failure" -- the Times' refusal to print what it knew about the Holocaust that consumed 6 million European Jews a decade after the Ukrainian famine.

In other words, the Times has institutionally paid for Walter Duranty's sins, therefore, Walter Duranty keeps his Pulitzer.

He also tries to justify the piece of tin by saying the Ukrainians who've mounted the campaign against Duranty have kept stone quiet on their own people's acts of genocide. In other words, because Ukrainians were involved in genocide, Walter Duranty keeps his Pulitzer.

One way we know news hacks are among the smallest minded people on earth is the sheer obsession they have with winning awards. The carnival that is the Pulitzers, with its months of long-distance preening and lobbying and begging and beseeching, is a forum for the circus clowns of print to justify their lives; without that medallion, everything, EVERYTHING is worthless. It never occurs to them that ninety-nine one-hundredths of what they do is worthless. They GOTTA have that piece of tin!!!!! Take even ONE piece of tin away, from even -- a BOTTOM-FEEDER, and what does that do to our SELF-ESTEEM?!?!?

Here's a question, Tim -- if you had lived in 1932, would YOU have done any better? OF COURSE YOU WOULD!

Posted 5:38 PM by Gene

From the excellent (though occasionally cloying) NRO, yet another indication that true unconventional wisdom comes to news hacks once in a month of Sundays: Somebody cuts down Willie Nelson's rep, and boy does that multi-million-dollar-owing monotone's rep need a good chainsaw.

Posted 5:34 PM by Gene

Bringing back MAHV will make atrocious basketball better?

Posted 5:31 PM by Gene

Gross.

Posted 5:28 PM by Gene

I don't know why Kinsley.com keeps knocking Bob Graham's candidacy. He may be stiff, and he may pander, and yes, he did give away some credibility on national security, but he isn't a flake, and I think he could beat Dubya.

Posted 5:26 PM by Gene

Hey Katz, you lost it a long time ago.

Posted 5:24 PM by Gene

I HAVE TO REMIND YOU MOVIE-AD-BLURB COPYWRITERS, it was all your adjectives of orgasmic praise over Dumb and Dumber, There's Something About Mary, etc., etc., ETC., that brought on all the dumb teen flicks you ostentatiously DESPISE. You scratch the movie moguls' backs so many times we can feel our skin peeling off.

Posted 5:16 PM by Gene

Ka-CHING!!!!!

Hey, it beats alimony.

Posted 5:14 PM by Gene

Well, I'll say this much: IT can't sing either.

Posted 5:11 PM by Gene

The GENERAL, listening to the hundreds of Beeb fans at Fogbound and his own appeas -- conciliatory instincts, says Israel must stop.

Posted 5:08 PM by Gene

SPIKE SPIKES SPIKE! Arfarf!

It's hard to root, though, when both parties are villains.

Posted 5:06 PM by Gene

Daimler selling Chrysler? Now there's a thought.

Posted 5:01 PM by Gene

I guess this means fifteen Israelis dead in the next several days, but the yayas will have an excuse anyway.

Posted 4:56 PM by Gene

I ask, does New York -- does the nation -- need Lincoln Center?

Posted 4:55 PM by Gene

Another immortal cliche: News hacks have said "rock music is dead/dying/defunct" for going on twenty years. Truth is we have more annoying pop music now than ever, and rap is just another form of rock, without the music.

Posted 4:51 PM by Gene

Somebody named Peter Plagens complains "a critic’s pronouncing somebody 'the greatest/most-important sculptor/bassoonist/director/novelist/cheesemaker/whatever of his generation'...says that the critic wants to get the authoritative-sounding but actually sonorously empty words 'greatest' and 'generation' together in the same sentence." True enough; but Peter wrote these words for BLUNDER.com, whose parent rag has been the home of the late Jack "I Never Met a Movie or Play I Didn't Like" Kroll, David "MOVIES ARE BETTER THAN EVER!!!!!" Ansen, and Devin "The PR Guy" Gordon, and which puts some overrated show-biz phenom on its cover every third or fourth issue, and that is perhaps first among the newsweeklies in running advertorials. Your truth, Peter, is somewhat vitiated by the vehicle you've chosen for it.

Posted 6:52 AM by Gene

I should have known the MORONS who told Howell and Co. about the "ransacking" of the @#$%&* Iraqi National Museum were "Ba'ath Party appointees".

And with all due respect Charles, "narcissist" and "snob" are too weak words to describe THE GLIBERAL.

Posted 6:45 AM by Gene

Awwwwwwwwwwww, poor Mrs. Heinz is having a "tough" time running for First Lady. Awwwwwwwwwwww.

Posted 6:37 AM by Gene

That new Oz musical opening on the coast sounds like a little bit more o'Branson, and what with the ad-blurb copywriters' proclivity to sugar-coat and soft-pedal everything, it's probably worse than he says.

Posted 5:28 PM by Gene

If this writer is to be believed, Tina does the absolute worst interviews on television -- worse than Larry, worse even than "Lollipop" Lou Dobbs.

How fitting. Sucking up seems to rob a person of his vocabulary.

Posted 5:19 PM by Gene

First the memorial pit would be 70 feet. Then it went to thirty feet. Now people are talking of eliminating it. It has been quite obvious from the start that the WTC rebuilders don't know what they're doing, and it was inevitable with the dearth of architectural visionaries like William Van Alen we'd be stuck with corporate boxes, or the late unlamented Tinkertoys, or the Shards. We're well on our way to what I feared would happen: construction of an ugly, impractical, politically-sired horde of white elephants.

Posted 5:12 PM by Gene

Sounds like Little Jeffrey's boys are doing HEAVY-DUTY lobbying, and as usual the news hacks are in up to their eyeballs in show-biz' dirty work, and by September they'll be so busy crawling over one another for the usual adjectives of toadying we may scream, as would the truth faced with Jayson Blair. By the way Jeff, why is it in your zillion-dollar corporate campaign you never mention the network? 'Course LEGENDARY never did either.

Posted 5:06 PM by Gene

Gregory Peck and David Brinkley at least superficially had a lot in common: Good looks, earnestness, a low-keyed nature and deep baritones, from (Brinkley) or identified with (Peck) the South, representatives of a media past that no longer exists. Both could have played Abraham Lincoln, and while I don't know if "the elder statesman of TV news" could have been an actor, Peck could easily have been a network-TV anchorman. While it is true that Brinkley became a star because of a gimmick -- the match with the long-deceased Chet Huntley, which was for quite a while more popular than Uncle Walt -- unlike the 'dos of our day Brinkley could write, and observe, with a trenchant wit that should have come to the surface far more than the demands of TV news would let it. As for Peck, it is to his credit that, while he did appear in a fair number of Valenti-era movies [i.e., automatic stinkers, or as the movie-ad-blurb copywriters would say, masterpieces], he refused to do "turkeys," and he even starred in a few gems -- mostly early on. Another word that comes to mind for both gentlemen: integrity -- and I say that in spite of Brinkley's unfortunate shilling in retirement for ADM; after all, Chet appeared at a piano bar for American Airlines just before he died. We forgive you. RIP.

Posted 4:50 PM by Gene

Little Lawwy still wants his pwanes! WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!!!!!

Posted 3:09 PM by Gene

First it's foam, now it's bolts.

Let's forget the shuttle and come up with something else, folks.

Posted 12:33 PM by Gene

You MUST read this review of Sen. Rodham's "novel." Brilliant.

Posted 8:22 AM by Gene

Mickey D's is backbackBACK with the loonies of Wall Street, nearly doubling in value in the last three months. And company management's trying to fix the chain with a heavy dose of the news hacks' favorite word, HIP. But there is reason for hope:

"Their image problem may be more psychological than physical," says Joseph Selame, branding director at Brand Equity International. No matter how the chain fixes food or restaurants, "There's a negative train of thought that goes through many people when they think about McDonald's."

Translation: bad food, dirty stores and LOTS of TV advertising = no trips to McDonald's.

Posted 7:01 AM by Gene

Another dazzling new innovation in terrorism from Saudi Arabia!

Posted 6:49 AM by Gene

Bush Under Fire in Congress for Criticizing Israel

Is Dubya taking advice from Papa's shifty-eyed appeaser Jim "The Fixer" "OIL! OIL!! ANYTHING FOR OIL!!!!!" Baker?

Posted 6:39 AM by Gene

Bush limits involvement in Mideast (MESS.com headline)

After the great successes of the last several weeks I'd say that's a good idea.

Posted 6:02 PM by Gene

I must admit I'm slightly uncomfortable with the idea of honoring show-biz types on commemorative stamps; the time will come when we honor Mick Jagger and Eminem and Jack Nicholson and other retch-provoking no-accounts. That said, we did put the likes of Judy Garland (and the dog not named Toto) on a stamp, something she richly deserved, whatever her private life; and if we're going to honor any other actress, let it be Audrey Hepburn -- an eternal beauty, a surpassing humanitarian. That face alone is testimony that we are not living in entertainment's golden age, whatever the grosses.

And for once the Postal Service got it right -- very right.

Posted 5:51 PM by Gene

Combine their buzz with Bill's surges and spikes and you'll get zapped.

Posted 5:49 PM by Gene

From Amazon.com's entry on Sen. Rodham's fully-ghosted factually-challenged "memoirs":

4 people recommended The Little Guide to Happiness: How to Smile Again in addition to Living History

Is this an appropriate recommendation?

5 people recommended Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism instead of Living History

Is this an appropriate recommendation?

I don't know. I think they may both fit in somehow.

Posted 5:33 PM by Gene

The pink-papered piece of puppy-training litter that gave us Candace "EW! YUCK!! GROSS!!!" Bushnell thinks HOWELL did a good job.

You and who else?

Posted 5:30 PM by Gene

I don't know, Dickie V, I think things are gonna get messy in the gloryland of professional college sports!

Posted 5:26 PM by Gene

I wonder what the GENERAL and his Foggy Bottom fogbrains are doing to discourage dissent in Iran.

Posted 5:18 PM by Gene

LEE SMITH FOR NEXT EDITOR OF THE NEW YORK TIMES!!!!!

(I guess even Bill's Kinsley.com magazine is embarrassed; usually it gives its worst pieces a big graphic.)

Posted 5:11 PM by Gene

As I've said before, news hacks are always walloping Wal-Mart not for the greedy conniving things it shouldn't do but for the politically incorrect things it should. This is the first time I've actually seen somebody defend the company for its "prudery." Could our republic take -- two such columns?!?

Posted 1:31 PM by Gene

In its latest hopeful thinking, NASA plans to launch the orbiting jalopies by daylight.

Didn't it launch Columbia during the day too?

Posted 1:23 PM by Gene

Why does America need three newsweeklies?

Or rather, why does America need newsweeklies?

Posted 1:14 PM by Gene

The French have arrested "a top al Qaeda leader"?

When do they release him?

Posted 11:13 AM by Gene

The public be damned!! We have a sixty-person call center!!!!!

Posted 10:57 AM by Gene

Looks like the roadmap has a pretty fair cigarette burn through it.

Posted 9:59 AM by Gene

The Axis of Evil got a little tighter.

Posted 6:56 AM by Gene

Gay marriage poses a conundrum for news hacks: It's obviously THE RIGHT THING, but support it with too much fervor and our single-digit declines become double-digit (not to worry about advertisers; they'll always be "cool"). WHAT TO DO?

Posted 6:44 AM by Gene

Looks like Martha's a shrewder trader than we thought.

Posted 6:24 AM by Gene

Of course we're hearing about it because the guy's A REPUBLICAN, but I'm not surprised the majority whip of the House wants to do a little favor for Altria MOtive; tobacco is the conservative's favorite drug. It is to Denny's credit he pulled Roy's you-scratch-my-back out of the bill, even if out of scaredy-catness.

Posted 6:19 AM by Gene

Yesterday I blew up at CURLEY (Nyuk! Nyuk! Nyuk!) for running a press release. Today I blow up at his former employer, USA Okay, for running this complete waste of time and resources about the definition of cool. If news hacks are going to spend so much effort trying to rot our brains, why don't they just end the game and declare bankruptcy? They already have the moral kind.

Posted 8:22 PM by Gene

Every column inch given over to press releases is one less to expose corrupt politicians, one less to expose church sexual abuse, one less to expose business chicanery, one less to expose supporters of terrorism, one less to expose squalor in schools, one less to...

And CURLEY (Nyuk! Nyuk! Nyuk!), I'd like to hear you tell me to my face this isn't a press release.

Posted 5:33 PM by Gene

A Slate typist posits that Wal-Mart is today's GM, without noting the irony. (A Slate article without -- IRONY?) If a GM could stumble and fall, one had better not hold his breath that the retail tyrant of Bentonville can't do the same thing.

Posted 5:22 PM by Gene

Gosh soon-to-be-seven-digit-earning GENERAL JR., you gave the show away to big media, why don't you do it with cable?

Posted 5:19 PM by Gene

Youth is valued. So is "edginess," whatever that is. Arrogant disrespect is so much more interesting than painstaking reverence.

Who's YOUR boss, Roger?

Posted 5:14 PM by Gene

Build clunkers, GM, and maintain your status as A-Number-1 Member of the American Society of Willfully Ignorant Advertisers, and you should be uncertain.

Posted 5:05 PM by Gene

One of HOWELL's central desires was to turn all his paper's cultural coverage into a quote fount for Andy S.'s Poseur Watch. Judging from stories like this, even with Howell gone, he's succeeding.

Posted 5:02 PM by Gene

It's not just that the same Gang of Idiots is controlling the media as twenty years ago -- it's essentially the same as seventy-five years ago. And it's wishful thinking to compare them to the chaebol, and hope they'll collapse. If a company like Paramount can endure in various forms for a century, its owner, Viacon, with much better management, could survive for many more centuries.

Posted 1:26 PM by Gene

It doesn't look good for purer-than-the-driven-snow Martha when her buddy gets 87 months.

Posted 11:47 AM by Gene

For Bloomberg, the Crime Rate Keeps Falling

It doesn't fall for anyone else?

Posted 9:50 AM by Gene

Another holy-cockroach bombing thwarted.

Posted 9:46 AM by Gene

Here's a double maroon: a maroon for serving beer to eighth-graders, and a maroon for partying with eighth-graders.

Posted 9:07 AM by Gene

If anyone can do away with the death tax, it's Pat Boone.

Posted 7:11 AM by Gene

I guess big media aren't the only kinds that pander. The guy behind the L. A. Examiner site has reengineered it into a trendy 18-34-demographic-targeting all-sorts-of-bands-just-a-step-above-the-Great-White-Circuit-level-we-couldn't-care-less-about attitude-laden PR site. Hey Professor, maybe we bloggers aren't as noble as you think.

Posted 6:54 AM by Gene

Boy I'm glad that's over ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

After moi, le bankruptcy.

Posted 6:50 AM by Gene

First it was the @#$%^& MUSEUM, then it was the archeological sites, now it's the oil industry.

Aren't we growing a little -- desperate?

Posted 6:32 AM by Gene

The Mogul's Friend lionizes another bad moviemaker. The news biz will be bad until the last byline, and one reason is hacks like Pat exercise their expense accounts in Beverly Hills when they should be exercising their legs in the unemployment line.

Posted 8:19 PM by Gene

News hacks can bloviate until they're blue in the ledger books about the "need" for more detailed child-suitability ratings for entertainment, but in the end they're doing it only for themselves; in the best traditions of synergy they protect their own freedom to act with impunity while covering themselves with a flashing neon-lit fig leaf. There's no difference between the Jack the Wizened Prune's ratings system and the powerless, self-serving ombudsmen at most newspapers; both are intended to placate, and to appease, and to create a fiction of responsible behavior, not to serve the public.

Posted 5:48 PM by Gene

Months after making a big stink about corporate accounting, why, if the government finds two of its quasi-capitalist bank-mortgage-company-agency-whatevers aren't cooking the books too.

Posted 5:35 PM by Gene

Another Line of the Week from John Simon:

The author should cover his face in shame with buffalo manure; fruit bats on the nipples are optional.

Posted 5:25 PM by Gene

Spammers and pornsters target the young, nuff said.

Posted 5:21 PM by Gene

"We have to make the decision in America if there's going to be local control of what we're going to teach our children," said protester Dave Daubenmire. "Is it going to be the people here in the community, or some judge in a courtroom in Washington?"

Amen, brother.

Posted 5:19 PM by Gene

So this is why the Beltway pols are mad at the FCC: It's taking away their cheap political ads.

That it's taking away a lot more besides -- diversity (not in the Je$$e sense), competition, free speech, excellence -- doesn't matter. But then the big things always count for nothing in DC.

Posted 5:09 PM by Gene

Here is what QUAGMIRE!!!!!!!!!!!!!! has come to: throwing a snit fit that Dubya can't prove Iraq had WMDs.

WE WON THE WAR, morons!

Posted 5:06 PM by Gene

In the post-Howell era, a certain hack (oh to be able to call every Times writer "Howell" again!) gets excited because he thinks rap will revive the musical. One thing's clear, the Times is doing what it does best: hoary cliches.

Posted 3:26 PM by Gene

Waaaaaaaaaah! They wown't wet me have my pwanes! WAAAAAAAAAAAH!!!!!

Posted 10:45 AM by Gene

Since we must talk about the sputtering Mideast peace process using the tiresome metaphor of the roadmap, what Mahmoud Abbas is doing reminds me of Yogi Berra's old line, "When you come to a fork in the road, take it." Before long Mahmoud and company should have absconded with a complete set of silverware.

Posted 6:53 AM by Gene

Rummy's boys FIGHT BACK.

Posted 6:48 AM by Gene

The Walters-Clinton Interview: Hillary Has the Chilly Deportment Down Cold

Cold? She gives liquid nitrogen a warm feeling.

By the way, Tom, isn't that true of most of your biz' content -- plugs masquerading as news?

Posted 6:26 AM by Gene

Must've been an EXCITING Tony Award ceremony. A future bus-and-truck staple wins, and two news hacks gabgabgab about "diversity," which I guess means the usual Je$$e kind of PC rainbow monochrome, and the hacks wait till the very end to tell us one reason we had RECORD B.O. was that ticket prices were high, which should tell us, if nothing else can, that the Great White Way is not a center for artistic endeavor, just an overgrown Branson with an attitude and gays.

And if there isn't enough evidence that Broadway has nothing to do with art, consider the sad song of Bernadette, overlooked for a Tony because -- well, can you really see that cute little pipsqueak as Mama Rose?

Posted 6:23 AM by Gene

What Bill the Entomologist did to computers, he will do to cable! BWAHAHAHAHA!!!!!

Posted 9:00 PM by Gene

So -- does this mean Slick won't ever be president again?

And have they talked about it?

Posted 8:24 PM by Gene

If this is the new New York Times, BRING BACK HOWELL!

Posted 4:33 PM by Gene

Anger Management

What I need when reading Devin the PR Man.

Posted 4:23 PM by Gene

Another PGA scorecard for the ages: in the first round of something called the FBR Capital Open (why not FDR?), somebody named Rick Zarlengo shot a 17 OVER PAR!

What did I say last time about the women's tour?

Posted 4:18 PM by Gene

How long were we down, GoogleBlogger? Eight hours? Ten? Twelve? Give yourselves a hand! Three fingers' worth.

Posted 4:17 PM by Gene

A lot of people love listening to radio commercials. They have to to keep the blasted things on all day. So Lowsy! ZON! You listening? Why not all-commercial radio stations? Just like you have B-92 and X-100, why not A-102 -- All Ads, All the Time! It would force Mad Ave and the jingle writers and the comedians to compete -- and might improve the quality of the commercials! Heck Lowsy and ZON, if that's all you want to give us, give it to us industrial-strength!

I am not kidding.

Posted 4:15 PM by Gene

Another daydream of Dick "The Bigger the Monopoly, the Better" Armey come true: the canned-cat-food business. It's run solely by Nestle and engages in -- you guessed it -- price gouging. Every year the Dilberts at the firm change the design of the labels so as to gouge even more. Haven't these clowns heard of deflation? Guess not.

Posted 4:13 PM by Gene

The thought has occured to me: was "Conventional Wisdom" -- home of the ARROGANT BLUNDER -- the first blog?

Posted 4:12 PM by Gene

Mr. ZipZipZip zips another one:

Can we imagine Darryl F. Zanuck putting "Dumb and Dumberer" on Fox's schedule?....Fitzgerald's "half a dozen men" are ever in a state of flux. Overpaid and over-worshiped geniuses one minute, off to the land of indie-prod and unreturned phone calls the next.

Can we imagine an AOL Time Warner rag hack not plugging the latest Matrix sequel? Henry Luce's "last and dumbest of the 700,000" are never in a state of flux. Overpaid, overworshipping "geniuses" one minute, off to the land of archives and recycling the next.

Posted 4:12 PM by Gene

Another brilliant GoogleBlogger error message:

Microsoft OLE DB Provider for ODBC Drivers error '80004005'

[Microsoft][ODBC SQL Server Driver][TCP/IP Sockets]SQL Server does not exist or access denied.

//global.asa, line 15

More such error messages and you won't need servers.