The first rule of journalism is, as in screenwriting, "show, don't tell." It's no wonder early Hollywood was populated with ex-newspapermen, who took their fastest-typewriters-in-the-West from New York and Chicago to the actual West and hired themselves out as scenarists and, when the talkies came, screenwriters. As Herman Mankiewicz wrote to Ben Hecht: "millions are to be grabbed out here and your only competition is idiots." Less appealingly, Jack Warner referred to his hired scribes as "schmucks with Underwoods."
Today's journalists are no different in their passion for narrative-spinning. Most of them have forsaken whatever dreams they once had about selling that big spec script for zillions -- and in any case there's almost no market for original specs in Hollywood these days -- but they've found that they can still make stuff up and get paid for it. Of course, they're still schmucks.
Case in point is Friday's one-day wonder, the BuzzFeed "scoop" that Trump told his shyster lawyer, Michael Cohen (a schmuck is there ever was one), to lie to Congress about his alleged dealings on a Trump Tower project in Moscow that never happened. |