"a fish, a barrel, and a smoking gun"
for 25 February 2000. Updated every WEEKDAY.

For five long years, Suck has waged a guerrilla war on the sleeping giant known as Media. We've dreamed of the day when we could force that giant to listen to us. The day we'd slap the giant awake and say, "It's noon, damn it! Go out and get a job!" Dream on, you say? Well, for one Suckster, LA's Ben Schwartz, that dream came true when the AC Nielsen Corporation of America picked him at random to become Suck's first Nielsen family.

At last! Elected to the Senate of TV viewing! Anything Schwartz watched now tallied directly into the ratings, his every twitch of the remote a shout from 70,000 US television viewers that determined what shows hit and what missed for all of us.

There was only one snag. Schwartz is a full-time employee of the Entertainment-Industrial Complex. He has written for TV and sold feature scripts to studios, which would normally disqualify him from the Nielsen system. But as Pat Buchanan told us, this is culture war. And Suck is down for the big win. So Schwartz did what he had to ...