Indefensible

     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.

     This is the beginning of Janet Malcolm's book The Journalist and the Murderer, a description and commentary on how journalist Joe McGinniss ingratiated himself with triple-murderer Jeffrey MacDonald and then in the book Fatal Vision refused to accept MacDonald's version that an intruder was the killer.
     Malcolm describes the relationship between journalists and their sources and subjects as one of exploitation, "seduction and betrayal," a "Devil's pact."
     What do you think of Malcolm's assessment of journalistic morality?