Rules for media critics

The latest BONG Bull contains these handy guidelines for media critics.

Jackman Wilson of the Eugene (Ore.) Register-Guard, serving a college burg
that, like all college burgs, has a hundred press critics for every working
stiff going into the icy rain with a notebook, compiled this Top 10 Rules
for Media Critics in 1993:

1. If it’s not above the fold on Page 1, it’s buried.
2. If it’s above the fold on Page 1, it’s sensationalized.
3. Everything but the entire universe is out of context.
4. If you can’t criticize what’s in a story, criticize what isn’t in it.
5. If it’s not a hatchet job, it’s a puff piece.
6. And vice versa.
7. No one can ever be accurately quoted.
8. All stories that fail to mention the problems on my agenda are trivial,
   and therefore a disservice.
9. Facts are never reported, but “admitted,” “confessed,” or “allowed to
   creep into the story.”
10. Everything newspapers do is done to sell papers, and selling papers is
    bad.