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The Journalist and the Murderer (1990)

af Janet Malcolm

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6701234,186 (3.83)41
Janet Malcolm delves into the psychopathology of journalism using a strange and unprecedented lawsuit as her larger-than-life example: the lawsuit of Jeffrey MacDonald, a convicted murderer, against Joe McGinniss, the author of Fatal Vision. Examining the always uneasy, sometimes tragic relationship that exists between journalist and subject, Malcolm finds that neither journalist nor subject can avoid the moral impasse that is built into the journalistic situation. This book is a work of journalism as well as an essay on journalism: it at once exemplifies and dissects its subject. In her interviews with the leading and subsidiary characters in the MacDonald-McGinniss case, Malcolm is always aware of herself as a player in a game that she cannot lose. The journalist-subject encounter has always troubled journalists, but never before has it been looked at so unflinchingly and so ruefully. Hovering over the narrative is the MacDonald murder case itself. The Journalist and the Murderer derives from and reflects many of the dominant intellectual concerns of our time, and it will have a particular appeal for those who cherish the odd, the off-center, and the unsolved.… (mere)
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"The moral ambiguity of journalism lies not in its texts but in the relationships out of which they arise--relationships that are invariably and inescapably lopsided.'

In the late 1970's journalist Joe McGinnis sat in with the legal team defending Jeffrey MacDonald who was being tried for the brutal murders of his wife and two young daughters. The thought was that McGinnis would have exclusive access to MacDonald and his defense team, and would write a book telling the story of the crime and the trial.

At trial, MacDonald was convicted, and through the following years, as MacDonald appealed his conviction and as McGinnis was writing his book, the two men continued to correspond. McGinnis concurred with and expressed his shock at MacDonald's conviction, and implied his belief in MacDonald's innocence.

However, when McGinnis's book was released, it portrayed MacDonald as a psychopathic killer. The letters McGinnis wrote had assured MacDonald of his friendship, had offered advice on the appeal, and had commiserated with him, while also asking for information he needed for his book.

MacDonald sued McGinnis for libel. The suit raised the issue of whether journalists as a custom or practice lie to their subjects to get information out of them (and whether, if so, this is acceptable).

This book began life as a New Yorker article. It is fairly short and there are no easy answers. The book raises a lot of interesting issues..

3 stars ( )
  arubabookwoman | Dec 10, 2022 |
Interesting point of view. ( )
  Kate.Koeze | Apr 15, 2022 |
a journalist writes about another journalist being sued for libel, using it as a prompt to meditate on the moral ambiguities of the whole enterprise. the opening sentence is justly famous: "Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible."

part of what she has in mind here is the subject being written about, a person apt to feel betrayed. in this case it is a man who certainly seems to have murdered his own family. oh well, too bad for him if he was duped by a friendly-seeming writer.

but also part of what malcolm has in mind is the reader of journalism. if the jurors on the libel case are representative, the reader would also be shocked to learn what good journalism requires. this is where it gets formally interesting: if this observation applies reflexively to this book itself, godel-like limitations seem to be set on what she can achieve with this work.

and yet! malcolm is so canny in her own observations about the unseemly side of journalism that the work approaches self-validation -- it reads as true. by the time i am told that journalists' quotations need not be verbatim if a tweaked version can better capture the gist of the speaker, i am somehow nodding along and feeling savvy. this is not a careful argument about the morality of journalistic practice, but it is an illuminating performance.

should also be mentioned that the court case she uses as a prompt is itself very interesting: we get a funny scene via transcript of william f buckley jr. on the stand explaining to a judge the nature of lying according to sissela bok and thomas acquinas. ( )
  leeinaustin | May 17, 2021 |
Malcolm gets a little precious and self-important about journalism sometimes, but that's okay, I was reading it for insights into the whole Jeffrey MacDonald situation, not for an analysis of journalistic ethics. The MacDonald case is one of the ones where it really clearly became about something other than the murder before it was even public news, so it's an interesting way to look at what makes some crime stories into a well-known True Crime Case. It's not just the publicity, although that's certainly part of it, the way it becomes more and more about who told what story, as opposed to anything about the case itself. ( )
1 stem jen.e.moore | Apr 13, 2020 |
In The Journalist and the Murderer Janet Malcolm examines the relationship between the journalist and his subject, through the example of Joe McGinness and Jeffrey MacDonald, the subject of McGinness's best-selling book, Fatal Vision. McGinness was invited into the inner circle of MacDonald's defense team and he spent hours with MacDonald, and he continued to write friendly letters to MacDonald after MacDonald's conviction for the murder of his wife and daughters. When MacDonald read the book, he felt betrayed and sued the author for fraud and breech of contract.

Malcolm was invited to speak with McGinness and to write about the case by McGinness's defense team, but after a single interview, McGinness refused to speak to her again. Malcolm constructed her book out of interviews with various people involved in both cases, as well as the court transcripts, but she notes the absence at the center of the story. Did McGinness cross a line in allowing MacDonald to view him as a sympathetic ear who believed in his innocence? Are journalists free to lie and deceive in order to get their story?

While Malcolm does not provide any solid answers, the presentation of the questions and of the strange story of the relationship between the journalist and the murderer does make for compelling reading and much to think about. ( )
2 stem RidgewayGirl | Mar 25, 2019 |
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Janet Malcolm delves into the psychopathology of journalism using a strange and unprecedented lawsuit as her larger-than-life example: the lawsuit of Jeffrey MacDonald, a convicted murderer, against Joe McGinniss, the author of Fatal Vision. Examining the always uneasy, sometimes tragic relationship that exists between journalist and subject, Malcolm finds that neither journalist nor subject can avoid the moral impasse that is built into the journalistic situation. This book is a work of journalism as well as an essay on journalism: it at once exemplifies and dissects its subject. In her interviews with the leading and subsidiary characters in the MacDonald-McGinniss case, Malcolm is always aware of herself as a player in a game that she cannot lose. The journalist-subject encounter has always troubled journalists, but never before has it been looked at so unflinchingly and so ruefully. Hovering over the narrative is the MacDonald murder case itself. The Journalist and the Murderer derives from and reflects many of the dominant intellectual concerns of our time, and it will have a particular appeal for those who cherish the odd, the off-center, and the unsolved.

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