Word: journalist
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows what he does is morally indefensible," New Yorker reporter Janet Malcolm famously wrote. "He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people's vanity, ignorance or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse...
...book, The Journalist and the Murderer, Malcolm describes the real case of journalist Joe McGinniss, who spent years interviewing and buttering up a convicted murderer—only to publish a biography of the man arguing that he was a psychopathic killer. The convict sued him for fraud; he had thought the journalist was his friend. The case ended in a hung jury, but the jurors had tended to favor the murderer...
...journalist is fair to his or her subjects, Malcolm argues. There’s always a kind of deception; the game is inherently unfair...
Plenty of journalists think this is nonsense. They say they’re always up front with sources. They don’t play any games. They tackle tough questions right away, and they don’t conceal their angles, even if this means that sources may be hostile or unwilling to talk. NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen, who teaches a course on press ethics, includes “You have not relied on deception, lying or trickery to obtain the information in your account” in his list of “how to know...
...read The Journalist and the Murderer the month before I started working on the students who plan to be president story. I didn’t want to agree with Malcolm. I thought it would be possible to write an arch saga of Harvard ambition without selling anyone out. I imagined my conversations with Caleb as a level playing field—a wannabe journalist and a wannabe politician playing the interview game across the streets of Georgetown. Caleb had experience dealing with the press. He had been hand-picked by Karl Rove to serve as his assistant. I wasn...