Remember when we used to call journalists “news hounds”?

Atavistic, now — a throwback to a bygone era, when investigative reporters caught a whiff of a story and rooted it out. There was a sort of gritty glamor to that style of journalism. Remember The Front Page? Five Star Final? His Girl Friday?

The aptness of the “hound” metaphor derived from the professional use of dogs to find criminals and missing children.

But today’s TV, online and pulp purveyors of fake news are not exactly known for their sniffing-the-story canniness. 

Maybe we could find some wild variety of the canine for an epithet.

Wolf? Journalists run in packs, and are vicious. Just like Canis lupus?

But wolves seem the noblest of canines.

Fox? Are today’s journalists clever enough to warrant that comparison? Hardly, though Vulpes vulpes is the Red fox, and many of today’s journalists lean far left, and red used to be the color of communism, socialism, and the like.

But most corporate news journalists turn out to be very establishmentarian. Hardly fox-worthy.*

Coyote? Now we are getting closer. The late-night yips and falsetto howls of Canis latrans do suggest the sort of onscreen frenzy we see among the fake news mavens.

But drop the canine comparison. “Hyenas are commonly viewed as frightening and worthy of contempt,” explains Wikipedia. “In some cultures, hyenas are thought to influence people’s spirits, rob graves, and steal livestock and children. Other cultures associate them with witchcraft. . . .”

And the several major species offers much by way of comparison: the insectivore Aardwolf; the paradigmatic scavenger, the striped hyena (Hyaena hyaena); and the infamous laughing hyena (Crocuta crocuta), which can be quite dangerous.

Apt? Apter? Aptest?

* “If you lie always in service to the left, you might be a Red. But if you lie mainly to serve your masters in the Deep State, what does that make you?”