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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"Nobody," she adds, "ever went broke overestimating the desperate unhappiness of the American public."
We would ordinarily assume Sara was either ignorant or was trying in a hammer-on-anvil way to be ironic. But we cannot assume the latter as people in the publishing trade tend to be the Mafiosi of words. And we can't assume the former because people in media know everything. We will merely assume Sara picked up on this line as if by osmosis (we suspect she could not identify the author) and decided to turn it into what she believed was a witty statement. But alas for Sara it is more telling than she may have intended, for the verbiage-disgorging biz has hit a double: it can wade in dough overestimating the desperate unhappiness of the American public even as it wades in dough underestimating its intelligence.
And Mencken's age had Émile Coué, as forgotten now as Oprah's latest fad will be twenty years hence.