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his surroundings.  He'd worked hard for it, broken many a scandalous story, ruined many of the undeserving, and above all, played the game well.  He'd survived the technological onslaught, and he'd done it with good old–fashioned writing.  The money and connections had helped, but his syndicated column didn't spontaneously appear each week if he didn't sit in this very chair and churn it out.  And scandals didn't happen of their own accord either, not all of the time anyway.  As in Viet Nam, sometimes they had to be… engineered.
    He had learned that to survive he had to flirt with an audience that begged for sensationalism, manufactured intimacy, and lurid details – an audience that could now choose from such an enormous pool of potential news sources that they were effectively unable to grasp truth or fiction, spin or wag.  In retrospect, it was really quite easy to do what he did.  Everything had been easy and now he had a way to keep making enormous amounts of cash in the manufacture of truth.
    In 1978, just as the little John Hancock Standard newspaper and it's ailing administrative staff was about to be blotted out by the insurgence of new media, Hack had stepped in and purchased the entire organization – the deteriorating building (which had once been a local drive–through bank branch), the now ancient presses, and the equally ancient staff (all of whom left within six weeks of his inception).  Initially, it was, perhaps, an honest attempt to create something on his own, a way to sow his own journalistic seeds.  Though as the little rag was resurrected each year with a fresh injection of his own money, honesty and integrity became less and less appealing – the whole notion became rather boring.  A decade of slowly diminishing returns, hell, no returns, was enough to flush the fleeting idealism from Irving's veins.  His whim had become a side project, and then lapsed into little more than an annoyance as he went on ski trips and bought new cars.  He'd realized one evening as he sat in the little building and tried in vain to wax nostalgic, that the reason for its ultimate failure was because it had become a reflection of his own life.  He'd known it for a long time.  Running a newspaper on the up and up was hard fucking work.  Integrity slowed everything down.  Being politically neutral was an absolute impossibility in D.C. regardless of what Uncle Cronkite might have wished to the contrary.  He finished a bottle of vodka that evening there in his chair – the same chair that he was in now actually – and had an epiphany.  The Standard wasn't useless at all.
    Hack would use the organization to maintain his reputation as… what?  A man of honor perhaps, the last of a dying breed in a world of corruption and outrage?  Something stupid like that.  The Standard would be his front for news that no one wanted to read, while he tapped his contacts, old and new, for stories that would bring the nation's attention fully upon him.  A lofty goal to be sure, but also one that Hack knew that he could pull off.  He had the favors to call in and he had the fucking money to put his name on the map forever.
    The inherent conflict was, at first, not easily found.  A column like his did garner a great deal of attention, even in the first year he was turning enough of a profit to stop funding the Standard out of his savings.  People liked what he was writing, they savored seeing the elite made to squirm, and he was in the position to throw as many people under the bus as need be in order to be recognized as the man who could do it with impunity.  Unfortunately, this did not – could not – come to be.  In order to keep both the Standard, and his sham of a reputation and write his column… Hack had to write under a pseudonym.  It grated on him each and every time he typed the fucking thing. 
    His chair's rotation stopped just short of 360º and he had to nurse himself around to his desk with a