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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In your spare time, you're an avid reader. One of your all-time favorites is Wealth and Democracy: A Political History of the American Rich by Kevin Phillips[*]. How come?
I love history. I try to understand cycles, which help me envision where we are now and where we might be going. That book was a great recap of the rise and fall of great nations. The United States is a great nation. We are, in my opinion, peaking and preparing for decay. We have already been decaying.
I found the book fascinating. He pointed out that, in peaking nations, we turn into paper shufflers. Young and hungry countries are mercantilists. They create and sell. But peaking nations shuffle paper. That's what we do here now in America. We shuffle Collateralized Debt Obligations and credit default swaps all over the globe. And this is what it gets us, this mess.
We will not guess whether we're declining (though our culture certainly is) but undoubtedly America has reached a new high in paper shuffling.
*The faux-conservative.