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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Tuesday, July 06, 2010
Newsweek: Funnyman Al Franken gets serious
I don't now how many times I've had to say news hacks think themselves so vastly more intelligent than the peons when it's often the other way around. Case in point: this MESS squib. You KNOW you're getting a puff piece just from reading it. And you also know you wouldn't be getting if if the subject weren't a conservative Republican. Maybe Mike thinks he can pull one on the readers but this sort of buffoonery merely adds to the exasperation of skimming the Web. If these clowns really think they can force us to pay for their garbage they'd better start thinking the peasants have SOME brains.
I don't now how many times I've had to say news hacks think themselves so vastly more intelligent than the peons when it's often the other way around. Case in point: this MESS squib. You KNOW you're getting a puff piece just from reading it. And you also know you wouldn't be getting if if the subject weren't a conservative Republican. Maybe Mike thinks he can pull one on the readers but this sort of buffoonery merely adds to the exasperation of skimming the Web. If these clowns really think they can force us to pay for their garbage they'd better start thinking the peasants have SOME brains.
Monday, July 05, 2010
In the midst of still figuring out what to do for a new computer we learned of Dell's shenanigans with its motherboards. One might charitably say such deceit was born of the end of the tech boom, when such businesses had to do business rather than rely on CNBC fairy tales; but given that America's Leading Outsourcer still faces a Federal probe for other management excellence the problem clearly started at the top. And further given how He has so thoroughly wrecked what was once a great corporate reputation maybe the Phil Mickelson lookalike is overdue to RESIGN.
ARCHDaily!
A cute little $3 million cottage -- but what's with the closed shutters and the prison gate?
A cute little $3 million cottage -- but what's with the closed shutters and the prison gate?
A Reasonable Man
In a world of loud voices and extreme positions, David Brooks manages to be both irrelevant and absolutely essential.
TRANSLATION: He's a "moderate" sighhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.
SUPERADAM!!!!! thinks he invented MENSA. When will our media superiors come to realize their readers may OCCASIONALLY be smarter than they?
In a world of loud voices and extreme positions, David Brooks manages to be both irrelevant and absolutely essential.
TRANSLATION: He's a "moderate" sighhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.
SUPERADAM!!!!! thinks he invented MENSA. When will our media superiors come to realize their readers may OCCASIONALLY be smarter than they?
Sunday, July 04, 2010
A soundtrack blogger whom the authorities have "harassed" for posting a few too many in-print recordings (including some Elvis albums) is shutting his site down today -- you'll know who he is if you have that interest -- and today I am frenziedly downloading stuff I don't have, and the cumulative effect is mind-bending: all these third and fourth-rate films, most of which have languished in vaults since their release, from outfits like Lopert Pictures (the smutty ahthouse division of United Artists), often with poster art showing sex-crazed men chasing beauties in bath towels -- and the most sensational covers front the most banal or lachrymose music -- and starring the work of Elmer Bernstein and Jerry Goldsmith and Henry Mancini and others who have not aged well, and you could not pay people to hear these soundtracks, let alone to see the movies; but even in this purposeless hyperactive ennui one can learn a little something, in this case from the back cover of one item I will not identify, a PR0N with pretensions whose blurbs hopelessly slime it as a period piece and the cri-TICS as blind nose-in-the-airs:
"May the bluenoses leave it lay [SIC!] for the pleasure of those whose taste it is. Stands photographically head [SIC!] and shoulders over [a competitor I will not name]...and more varied! [Punctuation SIC!] The first ten minutes achieve Modigliani tones. The cast is enthusiastic... [Punctuation SIC!] [The lead, er, actress] makes a mark on your emotions!" [Punctuation SIC!]
--Judith Crist, NEW YORK MAGAZINE [Capitalization SIC!]
"The most technically polished erotic movie. Bizarre, explicit, imaginative artistry. It's not a film for the "Sound of Music" - Radio City Music Hall - Reader's Digest audience. But for those who constitute the obviously very large audience for Erotica [Capitalization SIC!], it's certainly the more imaginative."
--Kevin Sanders/[Punctuation SIC!] WABC-TV
The Most [Capitalization SIC!] interesting film of its kind to date because it dissolves the distinction between sex films and art films. [The lead, er, actress]'s performance was remarkably persuasive! [Punctuation SIC!]
--Charles Michener/Newsweek
"The photography is good, the music even better...." [Italicization SIC!]
--Bernard Drew/Gannett Syndicate
We must stop here as it wearies us to have to go back and forth typing. We will say this goes on forty years ago and both movee and cri-TICS would today be laughed out of the business as they should have been nearly forty years ago. Certainly nobody has heard of Judith Crist in AGES (and rightly so) -- and she got ample TV face time and was a rival of the "great" Pauline Kael's. And who, many will ask with a grimace, was SHE? Of the others we will say nothing except that we are not surprised at this hack Michener's insight as some writer once lambasted his rag's now forgotten lead theater revuer Larry Krill or Jack Dull or whatever his name was for complaining about the lighting in nude scenes. Nor are we surprised that a GanNETtoid would be so interested in music. The next time an IDIOT rends his scalp over the demotion of movie revuers remember this example, and the hacks who need glasses for their MINDS let alone their EYES.
P. S. Tex Beneke playing music from The Alamo!
"May the bluenoses leave it lay [SIC!] for the pleasure of those whose taste it is. Stands photographically head [SIC!] and shoulders over [a competitor I will not name]...and more varied! [Punctuation SIC!] The first ten minutes achieve Modigliani tones. The cast is enthusiastic... [Punctuation SIC!] [The lead, er, actress] makes a mark on your emotions!" [Punctuation SIC!]
--Judith Crist, NEW YORK MAGAZINE [Capitalization SIC!]
"The most technically polished erotic movie. Bizarre, explicit, imaginative artistry. It's not a film for the "Sound of Music" - Radio City Music Hall - Reader's Digest audience. But for those who constitute the obviously very large audience for Erotica [Capitalization SIC!], it's certainly the more imaginative."
--Kevin Sanders/[Punctuation SIC!] WABC-TV
The Most [Capitalization SIC!] interesting film of its kind to date because it dissolves the distinction between sex films and art films. [The lead, er, actress]'s performance was remarkably persuasive! [Punctuation SIC!]
--Charles Michener/Newsweek
"The photography is good, the music even better...." [Italicization SIC!]
--Bernard Drew/Gannett Syndicate
We must stop here as it wearies us to have to go back and forth typing. We will say this goes on forty years ago and both movee and cri-TICS would today be laughed out of the business as they should have been nearly forty years ago. Certainly nobody has heard of Judith Crist in AGES (and rightly so) -- and she got ample TV face time and was a rival of the "great" Pauline Kael's. And who, many will ask with a grimace, was SHE? Of the others we will say nothing except that we are not surprised at this hack Michener's insight as some writer once lambasted his rag's now forgotten lead theater revuer Larry Krill or Jack Dull or whatever his name was for complaining about the lighting in nude scenes. Nor are we surprised that a GanNETtoid would be so interested in music. The next time an IDIOT rends his scalp over the demotion of movie revuers remember this example, and the hacks who need glasses for their MINDS let alone their EYES.
P. S. Tex Beneke playing music from The Alamo!
Boehner: Republican agenda still TBD
TRANSLATION: Republican agenda still MIA
OR:
Republican agenda still AWOL
OR:
Republican agenda DOA
OR...
TRANSLATION: Republican agenda still MIA
OR:
Republican agenda still AWOL
OR:
Republican agenda DOA
OR...
Saturday, July 03, 2010
All RIGHT already, she's BEE-YUUTEEFUL, but let us not forget she spied against US. She won't look so lovely in a FEDERAL PEN.
"When I met her, she didn't know which way was up," said her husband, then a 21-year-old British student who met Chapman at a 2002 Docklands rave and married her in Moscow a few months later. The couple settled in Britain and lived quietly for the next two years. But then, Alex Chapman said, his wife began to change.
In 2005, he said, she began having meetings with people she referred to as "Russian friends".
"She was transformed into someone with access to a lot of money, boasting about all the influential people she was meeting," he said.
She still doesn't.
P. S. The GRAWF says she had second thoughts. I'm having second thoughts -- about wasting my time with this story.
Obama awards $2B for solar power, hails new jobs
I got an idea, Your Omnipotence! Let's take all that moolah and aim a nice solar-powered RAY at it, and BURN it! It would do the same thing.
By the way Spock, how long do THESE jobs last?
I got an idea, Your Omnipotence! Let's take all that moolah and aim a nice solar-powered RAY at it, and BURN it! It would do the same thing.
By the way Spock, how long do THESE jobs last?
Clinton hopes Russia accepts U.S. missile defense [Home-page hed]
We hope so too, otherwise His Omnipotence might have to ditch it unilaterally, and then He'd have to feel bad.
Clinton says steel vise crushing global activists [Hed on story page linked above]
What are you doing to pry it open, HILLARY?
Hey EZ! Hey six- and seven-digit typing morons! You still happy for YOUR history-making president?
We hope so too, otherwise His Omnipotence might have to ditch it unilaterally, and then He'd have to feel bad.
Clinton says steel vise crushing global activists [Hed on story page linked above]
What are you doing to pry it open, HILLARY?
Hey EZ! Hey six- and seven-digit typing morons! You still happy for YOUR history-making president?
Friday, July 02, 2010
It must really be on the ropes; that store (on 16th and Chestnut in Philadelphia) closed weeks ago.
The TWXSTERS spent Thursday using 1,267 WORDS saying of Sen. Cicero what I said Monday in 180, and I don't make a big check from PEOPLE WARNER.
Where's the money?
Where's the money?
TRANSLATION: The high-tech-box biz can create oodles of jobs with a heaping dose of GUVMENT, and likely we'll ship most of the jobs overseas anyway, just as before.
You've done great things, Andy Grove, but this column isn't one of them.
You could say, as many do, that shipping jobs overseas is no big deal because the high-value work—and much of the profits—remain in the U.S. That may well be so. But what kind of a society are we going to have if it consists of highly paid people doing high-value-added work—and masses of unemployed?
The society we have now.
You've done great things, Andy Grove, but this column isn't one of them.
You could say, as many do, that shipping jobs overseas is no big deal because the high-value work—and much of the profits—remain in the U.S. That may well be so. But what kind of a society are we going to have if it consists of highly paid people doing high-value-added work—and masses of unemployed?
The society we have now.
AHTSJournal, at it again:
Peter Gelb On His Role At The Met Opera "I think people like to think I'm just a marketing person, but the fact is these artistic decisions, whether you like them or not, are coming from me. They're not coming from any board members. I made it very clear when I was hired that I am making all artistic decisions here."
TRANSLATION: He's a marketing person who makes artistic decisions.
Peter Gelb On His Role At The Met Opera "I think people like to think I'm just a marketing person, but the fact is these artistic decisions, whether you like them or not, are coming from me. They're not coming from any board members. I made it very clear when I was hired that I am making all artistic decisions here."
TRANSLATION: He's a marketing person who makes artistic decisions.
People are acting as though iPhone's flaw COULD NOT HAVE HAPPENED. This sort of gasp will happen when its true believers and proselytizers are thoroughly populated by the RANKS OF THE TOTALLY CREDULOUS.
Thursday, July 01, 2010
The Dubious Ethics of Andrew Breitbart
Why it's right to publish Sarah Palin's e-mails and wrong to offer money for private e-mails between journalists
Andrew Sullivan
(Giant of JERNALISM underemphasis added)
BECAUSE SHE'S RIGHT AND I'M LEFT!!!!!
I HATE pea-brained hermetically-sealed high-salaried PARTY HACKS OF ANY STRIPE!
Why it's right to publish Sarah Palin's e-mails and wrong to offer money for private e-mails between journalists
Andrew Sullivan
(Giant of JERNALISM underemphasis added)
BECAUSE SHE'S RIGHT AND I'M LEFT!!!!!
I HATE pea-brained hermetically-sealed high-salaried PARTY HACKS OF ANY STRIPE!
Eric Alterman on Journolist: "Many of Us Could Barely Stand One Another"
Many of us can barely stand YOU.
The Post TOLERATES—nay, EMBRACES—all kinds of opinions among its reporters! WAS IT OK TO BELIEVE THAT GEORGE BUSH WOULD NEVER LIE TO THE COUNTRY ABOUT IRAQ, TORTURE OR PRETTY MUCH EVERYTHING ELSE????? HOW ABOUT THE FACT THAT A PRESIDENTIAL BLOWJOB WAS SOMEHOW SUFFICIENTLY CONSEQUENTIAL TO THROW ALMOST ALL OF THE PAPER'S RULES ON SOURCING AND VERIFICATION OUT THE WINDOW????? (Window-smashing overemphasis added)
Substitute CAN'T.
Many of us can barely stand YOU.
The Post TOLERATES—nay, EMBRACES—all kinds of opinions among its reporters! WAS IT OK TO BELIEVE THAT GEORGE BUSH WOULD NEVER LIE TO THE COUNTRY ABOUT IRAQ, TORTURE OR PRETTY MUCH EVERYTHING ELSE????? HOW ABOUT THE FACT THAT A PRESIDENTIAL BLOWJOB WAS SOMEHOW SUFFICIENTLY CONSEQUENTIAL TO THROW ALMOST ALL OF THE PAPER'S RULES ON SOURCING AND VERIFICATION OUT THE WINDOW????? (Window-smashing overemphasis added)
Substitute CAN'T.
Hope for the FUTURE: Vivendi's sold "1.5 million copies" of a series of albums with "hits from domestic acts such as Billy Fury and Cliff Richard, as well as U.S. artists including Buddy Holly and Bobby Vee."
EXCELSIOR!!!!!
(Link added)
EXCELSIOR!!!!!
(Link added)
Today standing in line at Dark Shadows and facing a rag devoted to ESPN Network's soaps, we thought, who reads this? An audience of none? That Meredith is cutting the circ of Ladies' Home Journal tells me a lot of those copies go unread. Most rags are made to fit demographics, and their contents are an afterthought, written by the same pool of tired free lancers who couldn't spiff up their writing if THE MASTER suggested a witticism. "Many magazines have cut rate base in recent years, including Time, Newsweek, U.S. News & World Report, Reader's Digest, TV Guide, Playboy, Prevention, OK, Outdoor Life, Star and Woman's Day." Every last title ceased to amuse its readers decades ago. I repeat: who reads these things?
Speaking of The Daily Kaplan and the usual Romy, we see some people like that Chris Hitchens has cancer. This will happen when you try to put a smile face on a site, and it's also a variation on what happens when algorithms dictate Web content. Nonetheless too many of those likes like that Chris Hitchens has cancer.
The conservative political ideology of Newsmax’s chief executive, Christopher Ruddy, is at odds with the editorial bent of Newsweek, which strives to be apolitical in its news coverage though is often criticized as left-leaning.
EZ, maybe someday YOU'LL be CHAIRMAN of KAPLAN, INC.!!!!!
(Or maybe Kaplan-Post Media, or whatever they'll call the spinoff.)
(Via the usual Romy)
EZ, maybe someday YOU'LL be CHAIRMAN of KAPLAN, INC.!!!!!
(Or maybe Kaplan-Post Media, or whatever they'll call the spinoff.)
(Via the usual Romy)
Speaking of waste, through Its notorious Dining Zone Table Clings Mickey D's told me from now through 2011 It's donating a penny for every Happy Meal to the Ronald McDonald Charities. At a nearby table lay three ketchup packs. Question: How many BILLIONS of ketchup packs do Mickey D's customers waste every year? Maybe the Mick could get a donation from HEINZ.