By Glenn Whitney

I stumbled over this delightfully apt description of the airs and graces of the journalistic process in the philosopher Alain de Botton’s newish book “A Week at the Airport.” It speaks to the pretense of newspapers and specifically the seduction and betrayal dynamic among journalists, albeit one they rarely admit to participating in. Not only do some journalists seduce their interview subjects into revealing their confidences only to quote their revelations out of context or otherwise distort them, betraying their trust, but it is even more complex.

De Botton suggests that the newspapers themselves seduce readers into believing that heretofore hidden truths are revealed inside their pages, and that the interviewees themselves seduce journalists into believing they are bequeathing something vulnerable and valuable about themselves when they are really only posturing for the sake of improving their public images.

This sections comes just before an account of a 45-minute interview with Willie Walsh, CEO of British Airways:
Journalism has long been enamoured of the idea of the interview, beneath which lies a fantasy about access: a remote figure, beyond the reach of the ordinary public and otherwise occupied with running the world, opens up and reveals his or her innermost self to a correspondent. With admission set at the price of a newspaper, the audience is invited to forget their lower station in life and accompany the interviewer into the palace or the executive suite. The guards lay down their weapons, the secretaries wave the visitors through. Now we are in the inner sanctum. While waiting, we have a look around. We learn that the president likes to keep a bowl of peppermints on his desk, or that the leading actress has been reading Dickens.


Walsh and De Botton examining model airplanes. Source: www.alaindebotton.com

But the tantalising promise of shared secrets is rarely fulfilled as we might wish, for it is almost never in the interests of a prominent figure to become intimate with a member of the press. He has better people onto whom to unburden himself. He does not need a new friend. He is not going to disclose his plots for vengeance or his fears about his professional future. For the celebrity, the interview is thus generally reduced to an exercise in saying as little as possible without confounding the self-love of the journalist on the sofa, who might become dangerous if rendered too starkly aware of the futility of his mission. In a bid to appease the underlying demand for closeness, the subject may let it drop that he is about to go on holiday to Florida, or that his daughter is learning how to play tennis.