Word: lait
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...Hearst executive once told A. J. Liebling that "the public is interested in just three things: Blood, money, and...sexual intercourse." Hearstlings Lait and Mortimer have taken that creed to heart. They have written long and loud about what's wrong with America, always with at least one eye on the public interest...
Confidentially, say Lait and Mortimer, the U.S.A. stinks. The Mafiais around every street corner, with a slot machine under each arm. The Communists are pushing dope. Legislatures can be bought at a hundred dollars a man. Youth is "unbridled and hopped-up." "Greedy groups and misguided ninnies" are turning America--"man's bravest dream"--into a "nightmare." Luckily, Lait and Mortimer have been Johnny-on-the-spot, grubbing under every available rock for their case against the country...
...fact after fact hangs on the rawest form of hearsay, and the turn of many a phrase suggests that the co-authors worked with libel lawyers squatting alertly on their laps. Too many of the statements have no substantiation at all. this, for example, is part of the Lait and Mortimer pocket survey of the nation's colleges...
...showing uncommon restraint, call "hot journalism." It is not even that. The boys' candor comes at the sacrifice of coverage; they leave big areas of corruption severely untouched. One piquant example is their soft-pedaling of the numbers racket. The omission may stem from the fact that the newspaper Lait now edits (The New York Daily Mirror) prints daily figures from which enterprising readers work out numbers results...
...Lait and Mortimer sum it all up very well themselves. "We are reporters, not reformers...we have demonstrated that we are not sloppy workmen at our trade." There is no questioning that. The boys are as proficient a pair of mudslingers as have sniffed around in a long while. "We have nothing to sell but books," they say. That is true, too, but maybe a little less so. For while Lait and Mortimer will no doubt sell carloads of books, they may some day find, along with Mr. Leibling's Hearstling, that they have long since made...