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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As I was assembling my little inventory of realisms, I came upon still another one, even bleaker and more disillusioned. "You do the best you can within the concentration camp," Woody Allen told a reporter from The Washington Post. I had no idea the East Side was so bad. "If you face reality too much," he added dolorously, "it kills you. ... It's just an awful thing, and in that context you've got to find an answer to the question: why go on?" And so on in the same undergraduate vein, just more of Allen's bargain-basement despair--but then he explained the character of the darkness. "Once you get up in years, like seventies, there's nothing good about it. The dynamite women you see on the street, that world is gone to you. ... One of the great pastimes of my life was eying girls in short skirts, and that's gone. ... I'm not in bed with any of them." So that's it: nobody is coming upstairs to see his kvetchings. He isn't getting laid and it's Auschwitz. This is not what Primo Levi had in mind. It is also a curious complaint for a married man to make; but realism is realism. Allen concluded with this lasting reflection on the human condition: "Warren Beatty once said to me many years ago, being a star is like being in a whorehouse with a credit card, and I never found that. For me, it was like being in a whorehouse with a credit card that has expired." Give the man a Gitane! Why do people continue to honor this morbid fool? What is so fascinating about his corduroy puerility? In any event, we must now expand the ranks of the undeceived, and to democratic realism, progressive realism, and ethical realism add penile realism. Compared to him, however, we are all idealists.