THE NEWS HACK'S CREED:
I know more than you.
I make lots more money than you.
I'm smarter than you.
I'm sexier than you.
I appear on TV all the time.
I work ten minutes a day.
I rule the universe.
I'm going to live forever.
You are an idiot.
THE NEWS HACK'S CREED, No. 2:
A lie isn't a lie when it tells THE TRUTH.
THE NEWS HACK'S CREED, No. 3:
I've come to realize that the looseness of the journalistic life, the seeming laxity of the newsroom, is an illusion. Yes, there's informality and there's humor, but beneath the surface lies something deadly serious. It is a code. Sometimes the code is not even written down, but it is deeply believed in. And, when violated, it is enforced with tribal ferocity.
--JOHN "OMERTA" CARROLL.
THE NEWS HACK'S CREED, No. 4:
News isn't news when we don't report it.
PERMALINKS:
THE NEWS HACKS' DICTIONARY
THE EUGENE DAVID GLOSSARY
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Saturday, June 14, 2003
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."
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."
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?
Think we can blow up a second bubble?
Well look who's leading the Open? POLITICALLY INCORRECT!
If only Howell were still alive.
If only Howell were still alive.
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?
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?
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!
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!
Friday, June 13, 2003
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
And with all due respect Charles, "narcissist" and "snob" are too weak words to describe THE GLIBERAL.
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.
Thursday, June 12, 2003
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.
How fitting. Sucking up seems to rob a person of his vocabulary.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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?
Is Dubya taking advice from Papa's shifty-eyed appeaser Jim "The Fixer" "OIL! OIL!! ANYTHING FOR OIL!!!!!" Baker?
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.
After the great successes of the last several weeks I'd say that's a good idea.
Wednesday, June 11, 2003
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.
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.
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.
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?
You and who else?
I don't know, Dickie V, I think things are gonna get messy in the gloryland of professional college sports!
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.)
(I guess even Bill's Kinsley.com magazine is embarrassed; usually it gives its worst pieces a big graphic.)
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?!?
In its latest hopeful thinking, NASA plans to launch the orbiting jalopies by daylight.
Didn't it launch Columbia during the day too?
Didn't it launch Columbia during the day too?
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?
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.
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.
Tuesday, June 10, 2003
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.
And CURLEY (Nyuk! Nyuk! Nyuk!), I'd like to hear you tell me to my face this isn't a press release.
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.
Youth is valued. So is "edginess," whatever that is. Arrogant disrespect is so much more interesting than painstaking reverence.
Who's YOUR boss, Roger?
Who's YOUR boss, Roger?
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.
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.
It doesn't look good for purer-than-the-driven-snow Martha when her buddy gets 87 months.
Here's a double maroon: a maroon for serving beer to eighth-graders, and a maroon for partying with eighth-graders.
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.
First it was the @#$%^& MUSEUM, then it was the archeological sites, now it's the oil industry.
Aren't we growing a little -- desperate?
Aren't we growing a little -- desperate?
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.
Monday, June 09, 2003
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.
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.
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.
The author should cover his face in shame with buffalo manure; fruit bats on the nipples are optional.
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$$e sense), competition, free speech, excellence -- doesn't matter. But then the big things always count for nothing in DC.
That it's taking away a lot more besides -- diversity (not in the Je$$e sense), competition, free speech, excellence -- doesn't matter. But then the big things always count for nothing in DC.
Here is what QUAGMIRE!!!!!!!!!!!!!! has come to: throwing a snit fit that Dubya can't prove Iraq had WMDs.
WE WON THE WAR, morons!
WE WON THE WAR, morons!
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.
Waaaaaaaaaah! They wown't wet me have my pwanes! WAAAAAAAAAAAH!!!!!
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.
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?
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?
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?
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?
Sunday, June 08, 2003
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?
What did I say last time about the women's tour?
How long were we down, GoogleBlogger? Eight hours? Ten? Twelve? Give yourselves a hand! Three fingers' worth.
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.
I am not kidding.
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.
The thought has occured to me: was "Conventional Wisdom" -- home of the ARROGANT BLUNDER -- the first blog?
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.
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.
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.
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.