The long view.(allegedly humourous fictional memo to journalists)(Fictional Work)

MEMORANDUM

TO: All news staff worldwide

FROM: Management

RE: Guidelines for the next four years

As I hope was clear from my conference call this morning, many of us here on the eleventh floor are concerned with what seems to us to be an undue amount of attention and navel-gazing on the part of the journalistic community as it digests and responds to the next Bush administration.

Obviously, the CBS affair has had ramifications. We can no longer simply trust our sources to provide us with documents that will not stand expert scrutiny. I am particularly proud of this news organization's response to the CBS imbroglio, and if any questions remain, please refer to my memo of 11/17/04, "Avoiding Sloppy Work: A Guide for Teaching Your Sources about Fonts, Kerning, and the Autopen."

And yet, I can sense from some of your work that there's a backsliding mentality going on. It's understandable, of course, that the tragic events of the recent past--the Rice hearings, the Bush inaugural, the recent rise in consumer confidence, the tsunami--may have knocked some of you off balance. This memo is an attempt to get things back on track.