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
AMERICA'S MOST UNINTENTIONALLY FUNNY WEB SITE!
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The Looming Tower, Lawrence Wright’s tough-minded and cussedly persistent narrative opens with portraits of the triumvirate of developed Islamism: Sayyid Qutb, Ayman al- Zawahiri and Osama bin Laden. Almost at once, the question arises: should we be solaced or additionally galled by the poverty of the human material now so ferociously ranged against us? In these pages we meet some formidable schemers and killers, such as Khaled Sheikh Mohammed, the author of “the planes operation” (since captured). As for the other players, there are nuances, there are shades of black; but the consistent profile is marked by intellectual vacuity, by a fanaticism that simply thirsts for the longest possible penal code, and, most basically, by a chaotically adolescent — or even juvenile — indifference to reality. These men are fabulists crazed with blood and death; reality for them is just something you have to manoeuvre around in order to destroy it.
This is writing. We don't get too much of this from news types these days.