"The First Rule of Journalism is You Do Not Talk About Journalism"

Wells sent me this clip of Jon Stewart on bloggers that's so priceless you have to see it right now (click on the picture or here). The crack about journalists not talking about journalism brought me right back to all the New Journalism thoughts I've been having the last day or so (thanks again Wells).

1) For one thing, the press used to have a good rule about not talking about eacdh other--no matter what they thought, or even what they knew. In the good old days a newspaperman would always protect his own kind. There was no way to get those bastards to testify against each other. It was worse than trying to make doctors testify in a malpractice suit, or making a beat cop squeal on his buddy in a "police brutality" case.

2) The reason I know about things like "malpractice" and "police brutality" is that I used to be a "cop"--a police chief, for that matter, in a small city just east of Los Angeles. And before that I was a boss detective in Nevada--and before that a berat cop in Oakland. So I know what I'm talking about when I say most "journalists" are lying shitheads. I never knew a reporter who could even say the word "corrupt" without pissing in his pants from pure guilt.
-Hunter S Thompson, graddaddy of blogging, writing as Raoul Duke in Scanlan's Monthly, June 1970 (no, he was not really a cop).

The Flag has fallen in the dirt, gentlemen. We should pick it up.