Like doctors, soldiers, and police, journalists are among the select groups authorized to do harm. No one outside the business believes that. Through the way they treat their friends and families, people try over the decades to define how they prefer being known. The words, pictures, truths, and lies we present about them can obliterate that identity forever. You need only live in one of the world's many countries without a free press to see damage on a different scale.
Government corruption goes uncontested.
Cronies flourish, uncriticized. In societies with an aggressive press, by contrast, the daily fear of exposure is an unavoidable and healthy part of government and corporate life. This is an important line of work, but not a healing art. They begin to assume that there is no balance, no tradeoff, no limit to what we should do. Our duty, we tell ourselves, is exclusively to be tough, and then to let the public sort out the consequences.