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!
Blogroll Me!
![[Powered by Blogger]](http://buttons.blogger.com/bloggerbutton1.gif){kind=small}
The Daily Mail's site can be so stultifyingly stupid it is easy to ignore what it should run -- like this plug for a book on the brief, tragic life of the great Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin (left, above). His friend and colleague Vladimir Komarov (right, above) was sent on a mission in a spacecraft, the Soyuz I, he and others knew to be unsafe, but he also knew if he turned it down his place would be taken by Gagarin. There were other good reasons for people to keep their mouths shut -- like Siberia. So he went ahead anyway. Our spies overheard him screaming to his death. His burnt "remains" lay in state in an open casket. The catastrophic Apollo I fire three months earlier had no impact. That the Soviet regime had no regard for the lives of these epochal heroes shows that when Ronald Reagan spoke of the "evil empire" it was not to throw a tantrum.
The book, published by the UK house Bloomsbury, is scheduled out in the US on April 12 -- the fiftieth anniversary of Vostok I. It has two different covers.
(Originally posted 8:57 p. m.)