hit job

Noun

hit job (plural hit jobs)

1. (slang) A hit: a premeditated murder for criminal or political purposes.
   • 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
   • 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...2022, Lightning Jay, “Constructing Local History Units with Document-Based Lessons”, in The History Teacher, volume 5, number 2, page 340
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...2012, Craig Fehrman, “Reagan and the Rise of the Blockbuster Political Memoir”, in American Literary History, volume 23, number 3, pages 475–476
   • 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...2021, Lucas Sharp, “Branding Hillary: 2016 and the Semiotics of Neoliberalism”, in The Baffler, number 57, page 24 of 24-35