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.
America’s present need is not heroics, but healing; not nostrums, but normalcy; not revolution, but restoration; not agitation, but adjustment; not surgery, but serenity; not the dramatic, but the dispassionate; not experiment, but equipoise; not submergence in internationality, but sustainment in triumphant nationality!!
ALL RIGHT, already, His Omnipotence made a BRILLIANT campaign speech. What gives us the willies is that hacks presume to write history. We have mentioned before that Warren Harding was called a brilliant orator. With a few obvious edits Om could have delivered the above oratorical immortality yesterday. We're not knocking Om but dammit I won't let these tone-deaf drones dictate to me what I'm to think, and by no sensible measure is Om a BRILLIANT speaker -- except, PERHAPS, in his delivery.
No one's saying it, but the hacks have that giddy we-rule-the-world feeling: the presidential campaign started yesterday.