Over the last five months, I’ve spent a lot of time at Columbia U. working on an article about leftwing radicals for New York Magazine. Now it’s published, I’m struck by one of the prices of journalism: the use of people’s time.
People love to talk to journalists. I can never get over this fact. I like talking to them myself. We say that journalists are two notches above a used-car salesman, but in fact, we grant them power for a reason: they can quote us or print our names, and in the information age, there’s prestige in that. "The great mentioner," William Safire used to call it.
Anyway, I’ve talked to dozens of students in the last few months, and a few professors too. I’ve learned tons from these interviews. I don’t imagine these people were all selfless lovers of the First Amendment; a lot of them talked to me because they wanted their names in print. Then you get down to the ugly business of getting an article out and a lot of names don’t show up. For space reasons, or because they didn’t have much to say, or because you only figured out what you were writing in the last week, and the people you talked to then loomed in importance… It hardly matters, as a journalists you’ve relied on (translation: used) all these people, and been able to pay few of them in the coin they were expecting. You feel lousy.
The best piece written about modern journalism, Janet Malcolm’s book The Journalist and the Murderer (1990), began with a cutting take on the journalist-source relationship (amazingly, I can’t find this piece on the New Yorker website):
Every journalist who is not too stupid or
too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that 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.
Malcolm said that tough journalists just tell themselves it’s part of the job. And tough journalists use sources mercilessly, not giving them credit, taking all the credit for ideas for themselves.
