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 peoples vanity, ignorance or loneliness, gaining their trust and then betraying them without remorse. Like the credulous widow who wakes up one day to find the charming young man and all her savings gone, so the consenting subject of a piece of nonfiction writing learns - when the article or book appears _his_ hard lesson. Journalists justify their treachery in various ways according to their temperaments. The more pompous talk about freedom of speech and the publics right to know; the least talented talk about Art; the seemliest murmur about earning a living. The catastrophe suffered by the subject is no simple matter of an unflattering likeness or a misrepresentation of his views; what pains him, what rankles and sometimes drives him to extremes of vengeance, is the deception that has been practiced on him. On reading the article or book in question, he has to face the fact that the journalist - who seemed so friendly and sympathetic, so keen to understand him fully, so remarkably attuned to his vision of things - never had the slightest intention of collaborating with him on his story but always intended to write a story of his own. The disparity between what seems to be the intention of the interview as it is taking place and what it actually turns out to have been in aid of always comes as a shock to the subject. From The Journalist and The Murderer, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Journalist_and_the_Murderer ----------------------------------------------------------- Oslers Web: Inside the Labyrinth of The Chronic Fatigue Syndrome Epidemic by Hillary Johnson Crown Publishers, Inc. In 1985 in Incline Village on Lake Tahoe, Nevada, two physicians began noticing an unusually devastating illness with an array of symptoms never seen before. Puzzlement at the first few cases turned into alarm when more and more patients staggered in with the same debilitating symptoms. Called variously the Lake Tahoe Disease, Chronic Epstein-Barr virus syndrome, Yuppie Flu, and finally Chronic Fatigue Syndrome amazon/Oslers-Web-Labyrinth-Syndrome-Epidemic/dp/051770353X
Posted on: Sun, 21 Sep 2014 13:00:31 +0000
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