Posted 10:53 AM by Gene

The news biz is essentially a luck chronicle, a diary of people who've made it from people who want to make it in luck industries -- government at the top rung, big business, show business, sports. Despite the flatulent noises of "public service" the hacks are so stuck on chronicling luck they can't do anything else. Hence their abysmal output: when people looking for work kiss the fat fannies of smug snobs at the top they have no impetus to do anything but chronicle luck. Hence the need to always find "winners" and "losers" in everything, and to insinuate ourselves with the "winners". Hence the health-care "debate"'s other-worldly miasma; not one person involved seems to have ever been a human being, or sick. Hence the dessicated writing on foreign affairs; when you've spent so much time at cocktail parties you don't know what war is. Hence show-biz coverage that's a non-stop insult; despite the collapse of the business model it's still fun to be in with the in-crowd. Luck explains why news hacks are so insistent in getting it to fall their way, and why, when they are fired, they scream as though led off to the guillotine; they become mere mortals, ciphers, oblivious. Let's not forget blogging developed a rigid caste system as the biggest names, already de facto news hacks, solidified their luck perks. We don't know how much of the news biz' customer leakage is merely the Web, probably most of it, but surely in the back of some people's minds lies the notion that at its heart the news-biz is not about us, it's about a whole bunch of them.