And respectable media institutions do have their standards, but there is something insidious—and very human—at work in the preparation of a hit piece: the media's desire to believe in the evil of their targets.

“This isn't a profile, my dear sister-in-law, it's a hit piece.” “A hit piece?” Buck unfolded his copy of the Spectator and began looking for Anne's byline. “It's on page three,” Pearce told him helpfully.

She seemed so exacting and the magazine itself so impossibly glamorous to my college-kid sensibility, and did I really want to do a hit piece on an actor? […] And so the plan was set in motion: I would meet the actor Judd Nelson, find him appalling, and write about how awful hanging out with him had been.

Hit piece

Meaning

Noun

Synonyms