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Tuesday, April 6, 2021

The Journalist As Con Artist

In speaking to her fellow journalists, Janet Malcolm famously said the ugly truth about the profession: "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. He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people's vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse." This pronouncement is so devastatingly true, I'm sure it's not taught in journalism school. No one wants to get a degree in confidence game artistry. But that's what they get.

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