In this election season, good journalism is important. But what happens when “good journalism” comes up against people’s uncritical adoration of a candidate?

Janet Malcolm around the time the book came out.

We all know the stereotype of the “hit piece.” In Janet Malcolm‘s 1990 book The Journalist and the Murderer, she writes this about the professional journalist:

He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people’s vanity, ignorance or loneliness, gaining their trust and 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 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 public’s right to know”; the least talented talk about Art; the…