Dictionary

hit job en · NOUN

Pronunciation

• (Australia) audio

Etymology

From hit + job.

Meanings

1. (slang) A hit: a premeditated murder for criminal or political purposes.
   • I chased a series of documents alleging that Catto was murdered by an operative of the Democratic Party. I ultimately discarded this angle for three reasons. First, the discussion comparing lynching and assassination was conceptually abstract, and I worried about the background knowledge required for all students to successfully access it. Second, I was not convinced of the reliability of the documents describing the Democratic hit job. While there is value in having students debunk conspiracy theories, I was wary of centering that specific argument without additional textual documentation. 2022, Lightning Jay, “Constructing Local History Units with Document-Based Lessons”, in The History Teacher, volume 5, number 2, page 340:
   • Others cannot accept that a suicide or an auto accident was not a hitjob by the Ku Klux Klan. 2011, Ronald Kessler, The Secrets of the FBI, page 216:
2. (slang) A publication launched to damage the reputation of person or company.
   • One of the first critics to latch onto Where's the Rest of Me? was the journalist Jessica Mitford. In February of 1965, Esquire’s Harold Hayes assigned Mitford a profile of Reagan as a politician—a potentially valuable piece of national exposure. But Reagan stopped cooperating when he sensed, correctly, that Mitford wanted to write a hit job, calling her "the vengeful Miss Mitford" in a letter to William F. Buckley. 2012, Craig Fehrman, “Reagan and the Rise of the Blockbuster Political Memoir”, in American Literary History, volume 23, number 3, pages 475–476:
   • […] conservative talk-radio hosts amplified Insight’s claim to a much broader audience, despite a Clinton spokesperson’s denial of her campaign’s role, calling the charge “an obvious right-wing hit job.” 2024, Sasha Issenberg, The Lie Detectives: In Search of a Playbook for Winning Elections in the Disinformation Age, Columbia Global Reports, →DOI, →ISBN, pages 22–39:
   • While the “content issue” in her campaign is a glaring one, this piece is not meant to be a hit job on Hillary. Instead, I will examine past approaches to the visual “branding” of American presidential candidates and how they reflected the political realities and power dynamics of their time, and use these perspectives as a means of glimpsing the horizon of the possible. 2021, Lucas Sharp, “Branding Hillary: 2016 and the Semiotics of Neoliberalism”, in The Baffler, number 57, page 24 of 24-35:

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