I'll take "The Penis Mightier" for six hundred, Trebek!

That's "The Pen is Mightier, not 'Penis Mightier!'"

And the answer (in question, form) is:

What is a "hatchet job!"

Right!

What the heck am I talking about?

A hatchet job is a journalism piece that does nothing but raise questions without attempting to answer them, or report on them.

A perfectly infuriating example is this Wired.com Associated Press article.

Read it now if you can.

Done?

What did it say?

Let me try to paraphrase or something:

"Uh... the Bush administration broke the law."

Wait.

It didn't say that.

Let me try again:

"Uh... the Bush administration didn't tell lawmakers what it was doing. And that's illegal."

Wait.

It didn't say that.

Let me try again:

"IT DIDN'T FUCKING SAY ONE GODDAMNED THING!" (Added a moment later, for emphasis: "AT ALL!"

Really? Really, really?

Really.

A proper paraphrasing would be:

"The Bush administration maybe did something wrong by not reporting something - we won't tell you exactly what that something was, probably/possibly because our anonymous source doesn't know or didn't want to say, so we have no clue - to the House Intelligence Committee. This guy, who has a history of knocking Bush and his cronies, acknowledges that the Intelligence Committee can't be told of everything, but he feels personally that it was kindof a big deal and should have been told. This "may represent a breach of responsibility," were his exact words."

I'm not sure, but I think I can put it even more concisely: "Something (?) may have been done by one of our intelligence agencies, and this might have been better handled by informing the House Committee of it, at least this one guy thinks so on the Committee."

But that's not what you take away from that article.

It's a hatchet job, sexing up the facts - the facts which are so sparce (more or less what I paraphrase) - into something that hundreds of thousands of people who read Wired.com will take as "yet another example of the Bush administration raping our privacy laws and rights." Afterall, what's the article's headline? More Secret White House Intel

But notice that it doesn't say anything about privacy issues (the recent intel scandels), about what is being discussed. How many facts, how many pieces of actual information are brought up? The last paragraph is where most of the facts are reported, and all that does is highlight the dude's history of dissenting against the Bush administration.

It's meant only to be a specter, a claimed territory in your mental real estate, which raises questions about how the Bush administration is abusing power... all this as does no actual reporting on anything.

It's like the news blurbs on evening television for the next day's special report that ask, "Is your child safe at school?!" It's a ploy for mental real estate.

A hatchet job.

I hope I'd pick up on and ridicule a "news report" like this about Kerry or Gore. Who knows. The point is that it's lame.

And sadly, really effective in today's world of shallow thinkers.