It is almost a tradition that certain figures who appear often in the media — actors, artists, 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. The condition is understandable in actors, those talking images forced by the demands of self-promotion 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 all manner of nonsense, but I do not want to talk about them here. My interest lies with the journalists, for whom, of course, their profession is the most beautiful in the world. They have the added advantage of manufacturing the contents of their own industry, so 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 put on show and listened to, and that the rest of us mortals are bound to take an interest in their profession — like the child who must like the food his mother cooks for him. I am referring, of course, to the famous journalists: those who present and speak in the first person, who put their by-line on things, who are the headline draw for the media companies. Countless times I have heard them say, in the throes of 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 well short of, since their own rigour answers 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 forever running after the news, and that they perform a public service and improve the world (in The Myths of the Free Press I go further into this rhetoric). In the end, this storyteller’s posturing — which one will scarcely ever see in the anonymous editors and technicians — owes a great deal to, once again, self-promotion, unconscious vanity, and ignorance of reality, or to the experience of a reality that laminates them and puts them in the shop window simply because they are famous. So 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, in terms of effort, difficulty, and merit, the journalist’s profession is a 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 on these storytellers who, given the chance, would do no more than make a caricature of their realities.