Janet Malcolm has some choice words about journalism in her extended essay in the 3 May 2010 New Yorker.
Over the years, the social status and the education level of journalists has risen and some journalists write extremely well. But the profession retains its transgressiveness. Human frailty continues to be the currency in which it trades. Malice remains its animating impulse. A trial offers unique opportunities for journalistic heartlessness. When the malignant, often libellous words of battling attorneys are lifted out of the heated context of the trial and set in cold type, a new, more exquisite torture is suffered by the objects of their abuse — who now stands exposed to the world’s abuse.
Malcolm loves the word transgressive by the way…it featured in her New Yorker piece on Sylvia Plath: “the transgressive nature of biography is rarely acknowledged.” (Transgressiveness is Malcolm’s coinage, btw.)
Journalists request interviews the way beggars ask for alms, reflexively and nervously. Like beggars, journalists must always be prepared for a rebuff, and cannot afford to let pride prevent them from making the pitch. But it isn’t pleasant for a grown man or woman to put himself or herself in the way of refusal. In my many years of doing journalism, I have never come to terms with this part of the work. I hate to ask. I hate it when they say no. And I love it when they say yes.
Read the whole thing, which features a bizarre attempt at intervention by Malcolm in the trial itself…