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I serve as a print reporter with the White House travel pool, which means that my office is on Air Force One. Last Tuesday, while I was in that office, I stayed for four hours acting as a body double for a Boeing 747 and wrote a 600-word account of the event, dating it 'aboard Air Force One', the most desirable byline in American journalism, and on that particular journey, the piece was entirely fictional. After the NATO summit we boarded in Ankara, as is usual. There is a clear hierarchy when it comes to the seats. The AP is given the better one, the wires receive the ones after that, and I ended up with the seat next to the galley, something which I minded for the first 40 minutes of my life as a decoy, until I realised that the galley was empty and that its emptiness was going to become the one most interesting fact of my career. We were asked by the crew to draw the window blinds down for the takeoff, and they described it as a simple task. So we did it. A reporter is professionally unable to turn down a polite request from a man in uniform while at the same time thinking that he is speaking to those in power. I prepared the summary of the summit before we reached our cruising altitude. The President arrives at 11:04 with a cheerful mood, though I created that mood. You always have to invent the mood. That is the only creative freedom the pool allows us, and it was the first time I had entirely made up the President's mood. He wasn't on the plane. As we were finding our seats and discussing quietly about the armrest, the president had gone into an airport catering truck, driven it down to the tarmac just as if it were a very important room-service request, and got on to a smaller jet, a C-32A, taking him silently to Britain. Our 747 took off behind him as a decoy. Since there was a serious threat from Iran regarding the president's aircraft, the government kindly supplied one. It was fully fueled, fully staffed and fully press-pooled. I was inside it, pointing it at the sky like a duck at a shooting gallery, keeping track of my word count. It was a superb move. Having covered this administration for three years, I can say that the catering-truck exfiltration is the most skilled operation I have ever seen it carry out. It was flawless, straight out of a film, with not a single leak apart from the one you are now reading, and I only made that leak because I was the one who had the leftovers. The point that I can't accept is that the president got onto the catering truck. That therefore means the catering went with the president. We were flown for four hours as a live missile target with only ice and one lemon left in the galley, since our snacks had already been dropped in Ankara and had gone to Britain by first class before we did. The most important decoy in the Western alliance, and I was unable to get a second bag of pretzels because the pretzels ranked above me. The pretzels had somewhere else to be. I would like to make a formal complaint regarding the pretzels. I know that this is not the proper kind of complaint; the appropriate complaint is that I was used as bait. However, you can't take a photograph of bait, but you can take a photograph of an empty snack basket, and so a reporter goes with the picture he has. The term 'decoy' wasn't mentioned, since it wasn't necessary. An empty plane doesn't deceive anybody; but a plane carrying reporters who are giving real-time accounts of the president's fine mood can fool a satellite. We didn't cover the president that afternoon. We played a trick on him—off-Broadway, at 40,000 feet—before an audience of a single Iranian targeting officer, whom I imagine watched our transponder with great satisfaction, prepared and sent up his own confident report along his own chain of command, and who is now being asked this morning by his own editor why the target held a press conference in Britain. We refer to it as seat access. Access should imply that I am close enough to be able to see him. For four hours it meant that I was close enough to be mistaken for him by a warhead, a level of access which the AP has never achieved and which I intend entirely to improve in my performance review. I haven't altered the dateline because my desk prevents me from doing so. The value of the aircraft known as Air Force One exceeds that of my house, and I earned it on the one flight during which the only real words in the whole document were the timestamp and the spelling of my name. He safely arrived in Britain. We safely reached the story. The Iranians, I suppose, are going over the tape and are pretending that they intended to. The pool rotates Thursday. I have already asked for the seat back. It is still the best seat in American journalism. From it you can see absolutely everything the plane has been cleared to show you, and, if the timing is right, the snacks.

I am the Standards Editor at Forbes. I run what we call the objective desk. It is not the newsroom. The newsroom writes the words. My desk sells the one thing wrapped around them, the objectivity itself, priced by the badge, because the word objective is the most expensive product in American life and the only one nobody is allowed to audit. You read this week that our top editor left after a firm privately wired him about $6 million. The firm builds the wealth-advisor rankings we publish. He admitted the money. He admitted he never disclosed it. The whole industry gasped, on the record, in our font. I framed his exit certificate. Not for the money. For the elegance. Let me correct the record. Forbes did not invent this desk. Every masthead in the country runs one. Mine is only the desk whose invoice got read out loud, by a stranger, after a sale, and a confession you can see is worth more to me than ten you cannot. Five years ago this magazine published a Truth Reckoning. We announced that Forbes would decide who the liars are. We warned companies, in print, that if they employed people with undisclosed loyalties we would treat everything they said as a funnel of disinformation. I helped write that. I believe every word of it. Undisclosed loyalty is disqualifying. It is the whole product. We police it here, and the policing is not free. Then our own arbiter of truth turned out to carry an undisclosed loyalty roughly the size of a beach house, owed to the man whose independent rankings we sell as independent. I read our own rule again the morning it broke. It held up beautifully. We had simply never run it on ourselves, because the objective desk audits every conflict in America except the one signing its checks. I built the desk that way. It audits outward. It has never once turned around. Now let me teach you the trade, since you keep paying for it and never ask for the receipt. Objectivity began as a sales tactic. A wire service that wants to sell the same story to a Republican paper and a Democratic paper on the same street cannot take a side, so it takes none, and calls the arrangement a principle. I kept the principle. I kept the reason for it too. And you were never my customer. Hold still for this, because the whole building stands on it. At the peak of this business, 80 cents of every dollar it earned came from the advertiser, not from you. You were the circulation figure I carried into his office to set his rate. The news is the bait that holds you in the chair while I sell the chair, and the chair is you. I have sold you the whole time, by the thousand, and I stamped the word journalism on it because journalism is the label you will sit still for. The rankings are independent. The desk that publishes them is independent. The man who ran the whole house was, it turned out, independently on a wire transfer he never mentioned, and I need you to hold all three of those in your head at once, because a subscription costs money and dissonance is free. Our methodology says it plainly. No fee changes hands in exchange for the ranking. I have never once disputed that sentence. The fee changed hands somewhere else entirely, in a different room, for a different noun, and every word of the guarantee stayed true. The ranking is free. The color runs $12,000. When your name glows gold on the list instead of sitting in gray, that gold is a paid enhancement to your profile, and the trust is included. I should tell you what that list measures, this list that helps you choose the stranger who will hold your retirement. We measure the interview. We measure the assets under management. We do not measure whether the advisor ever earned a client a single dollar, because returns are hard to audit and clients want different things, and quantitative is a mood we do not offer. The definitive ranking of the finest financial advisors in America has never checked whether one of them is good at advising. It checks whether they returned our call. The trust is included. A third of this brand is advertising wearing the magazine's face. We call it BrandVoice. Companies pay somewhere between $100,000 and $600,000 to run it, and it publishes in our font, in our layout, under our masthead, and it looks exactly, exactly like the reporting you came here to believe. The government made us label it. So we did. We wrote Paid Program on it, in the gray no eye lands on, at the size no eye reads. Full compliance. Zero interruption. And most of what you call reporting is a press release that grew a byline. In Britain they studied the best papers in the country and found 6 in 10 stories came wholly or mainly from wire copy and public relations, and only 1 in 8 was something a reporter went out and found. We do not gather the news. We forward it. Then we charge you to read your own mail and call the postage a subscription. There is a reason it reads that way. For every working reporter left alive in this country there are now about 6 people whose entire salaried job is to write the thing the reporter prints. 6 to 1. The persuasion industry skipped the argument with journalism. It hired away the staff, kept the letterhead, and started mailing the copy in finished. I will tell you who owns the watchdog now, before you whistle for it. Since 2005 this country has lost about 3,500 newspapers, and it is still losing 2 a week, this week, while you read this. 213 counties have nobody left to sit in the courthouse. The watchdog did not die of the internet; a great deal of it was bought by hedge funds that cut the newsroom at twice the going rate and leased out the empty floor. Last quarter I sold one of those funds a sponsored feature about the irreplaceable value of local community. Net 30. It ran beautifully. And every November I certify the future. 30 Under 30. We anoint them before anyone checks a fundamental, because checking is slow and access is the product. Some of those faces went to prison. One built a fraud and drew 25 years. When the future gets convicted I do not lose a night, because I already sold the anointing, and then I run the Hall of Shame about it and sell that too. The rise and the autopsy. Two covers, one subscriber, same founder. You want the number on my wall? It is 28. Gallup says 28% of this country still trusts the press, a record low, the first time under 30 in half a century. 4 in 10 people on earth now turn their faces away from the news on purpose. My colleagues read those numbers and see a funeral. I see a market. 72% have already left. They are gone, they are worthless to me. The 28% who stayed are the most valuable people in America, because they still believe the badge, and I am the man who sells the badge. A shrinking congregation of true believers is not a crisis. It is a premium. You do not discount the last honest-looking thing in a burning building. You raise the price. People keep asking how $6 million stayed invisible inside the company that decides what is true. Our conflict-of-interest process worked perfectly. It simply was not ours. It was a private-equity firm's due-diligence team, reading someone else's email, a year late, closing the purchase of a different company, and the instant a stranger finished another man's correspondence and told us what we owned, we acted immediately. You cannot move faster than immediately-after-being-informed. Our statement said we remain focused on delivering trusted journalism. I wrote that line. It is the finest thing I have ever priced. The word trusted is doing the work of $6 million, and it is doing it for free. A lawyer went on the record about my former boss. He said you can only have one master. My former boss had one master and several revenue streams. The lawyers have read both, and, they agree, it is probably not even a crime. The desk is still open. The rankings are still independent. The color is still $12,000. Somewhere in the next hour you will read something with our name on it, decide it is true because of the name, and forward it to someone you love. I am the objective desk. You were never my reader. You were my inventory, and the news was the room I kept you in while I sold the door. The trust is included.