If you want to succeed in journalism, you need to select topics carefully, research thoroughly, interview intelligently, and use adverbs sparingly. Or you can write about sex.
It doesn’t matter what you say about it. “The sex was a vapid, purple, pistachioed umbrella,” you can write, and yours will be the most-read story on your publication’s Web site. You might even win a Pulitzer. If the Wall Street Journal followed Cosmopolitan Magazine’s lead and ran more stories like “50 tips to please Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke in bed,” they could finally afford real photographs instead of those silly doodles. (more…)
When it comes to the Internet, old people have the know-how of squid. I’m not sure if it’s because they’re stuck in their ways or because there aren’t a lot of web sites dedicated to false teeth, but something about going online leaves them quaking in their Depends.
[Note to editor: Please remove that paragraph from the print edition. Old men are tough and can kick my ass. Probably old women, too.] (more…)
Between the Iraq War, deniers of global warming, Guantanamo Bay detainees and pushy American tourists, the United States’s perception in the global community has hit a staggering low. So the last thing we need is for the world to know how vile our beer is.
Belgian company InBev bought Anheuser-Busch, which brews nearly half of all U.S. beer, in a $52 billion deal. The European company announced its intentions to promote Budweiser internationally to the level of Coca-Cola. But Budweiser, like all other top American beers, is swill. Just look at our two most popular domestic brands - there’s Miller Lite, which tastes like pennies, and Bud Light, which tastes like bland pennies. (more…)
There’s a code of ethics in the news media which, as far as I can tell, serves no practical purpose. You’d sell a lot more papers if you could make up headlines like “McCain grows to colossal size; uses laser-vision to slash budget.” That’s why working at Fox News is such a plum job - they don’t worry about things like “journalistic ethics.”
Here’s what Fox did last week. After New York Times media reporter Jacques Steinberg wrote accurately about “ominous” ratings trends for Fox News, which is losing ground to CNN and MSNBC, anchors on the “Fox & Friends” morning show called Steinberg’s work a “hit piece.” They also referred to Steinberg and his editor, Steven Reddicliffe, as “attack dogs.” So far, the network was still within the bounds of standard journalistic practices - you see this stuff all the time from respected media, like NPR’s recent report, “Peggy Noonan: Stupid Tramp Or What?” (more…)
At Chicago’s gay pride parade Sunday afternoon, I saw an outlandish collection of freaks and degenerates, out and proud for something inherently shameful. I’m talking about the protestors.
Near the end of the parade’s route on the corner of Pine Grove and Diversey, wooden riot-control barricades and a few disinterested-looking cops surrounded about 20 or 30 fundamentalist Christians. They yelled at the parade’s participants, often from a loudspeaker at the top of a rickety folding ladder. “You’re not really happy,” a frowning young man told a float of pink underwear-clad men who, from the passion of their dancing, were having a much better time than the demonstrators. (more…)