It is almost a tradition that certain figures who appear frequently in the media — actors, artists, or journalists — should declare with a crystalline smile and a victorious pride that they are lucky enough to practise the most beautiful profession in the world, and that ever since they were tiny children they had known their vocation was to tell stories. This condition is understandable in actors, those talking images obliged by the need to promote themselves to put themselves on display in launches, interviews, and galas, where they often hold forth with the affected depth they have learned in their most complex roles — the ones in which they sink into the cinematic torments of the lofty souls they portray. In artists there is a similar need for promotion, even at the cost of uttering the most varied nonsense, but I do not want to talk about them here. My interest is in the journalists, for whom of course their profession is the most beautiful in the world. They have, in addition, the advantage of manufacturing the contents of their own industry, so that they can interview each other like rabbits churning together in a burrow. They seem to assume that, by the mere fact of being there, they already deserve to be exhibited and listened to, and that the rest of us mortals are obliged to take an interest in their profession — like the child who must like the food his mother makes for him. I am referring, obviously, to the famous journalists: those who present and speak in the first person, those who put their by-line on things and who are the headline draw of the media companies. Countless times I have heard them say, when they practise their public, gregarious onanism, that they have always wanted to tell stories. This has not led them, however, to become historians — a profession whose storytelling demands a rigour they fall very short of, because their own rigour is subjected to the demands of the marketplace. They justify themselves with the line that their telling is of the present moment, which forces them to be always running after the news, and that they are performing a public service and improving the world (in The Myths of the Free Press I go deeper into this rhetoric). In the end, this storyteller’s posturing — which we will almost never see in the anonymous editors and technicians — has a great deal of, once again, self-promotion, unconscious vanity, and ignorance of reality, or experience of a reality that laminates them and puts them in the shop window by the mere fact of being famous. Thus we see so many self-proclaimed journalists and storytellers basking in their privilege, even when what they are talking about is sport or gossip — something anyone can do, and which in fact anyone does. So much so that, viewed from the standpoint of effort, difficulty, and merit, the profession of the journalist is a very meagre one. But of course, physicists, doctors, teachers, farmers, engineers, bakers, lorry drivers, and librarians cannot interview themselves to proclaim theirs the most beautiful profession in the world, and depend for that on these storytellers who would do nothing more than make a caricature of their realities.