The Journalist And The Murderer (2004) - Plot & Excerpts
In 1979, Dr. Jeffrey MacDonald was convicted of the 1970 murders of his pregnant wife and two daughters, ages 5 and 2. He had asked journalist Joe McGinniss to write a book about the trial, and McGinniss was not only a close observer, but even became a member of the defense team. MacDonald and McGinniss became friends. But the publication of McGinniss' book Fatal Vision in 1983 revealed McGinniss' belief, hidden until then, that MacDonald was a lying sociopath, guilty of the murders. Furious and feeling betrayed, MacDonald sued McGinniss for fraud. As evidence he produced many sympathetic letters McGinniss had written to him in prison, proclaiming his outrage over the verdict. That civil trial ended in a hung jury; McGinniss eventually settled and paid MacDonald $325,000. Enter journalist Janet Malcolm, whom McGinniss and his legal team solicited in 1987 to write about MacDonald v. McGinniss. Malcolm accepted, but after a five-hour interview McGinniss bailed on the project. Malcolm wrote about the case anyway, in two long New Yorker articles which became this book.This is great journalism and wonderful writing, clear and accessible but sometimes also surprising and provocative. Malcolm is a brilliant observer of human behavior and motivations and she's not above noting her own errors of perception or flawed assumptions. Looking at the McGinniss case provides a pretext for her to examine all feature journalism as a moral enterprise, and a power relationship between journalist and subject in which the former holds all the cards. (She begins by comparing this relationship to Stanley Milgram's experiment in which test subjects were instructed to administer what they thought were increasingly painful electric shocks to others, after which they were "debriefed" or "dehoaxed," told the real purpose of the experiment, which was to see how cruelly authoritarian they could be. The journalist's subject goes through a similarly disorienting and humiliating dehoaxing when he reads the journalist's expose, she argues.) Journalism is "morally indefensible." So how are we to take her journalism? Her confessional tone makes her seem deeply honest and frank, yet she also warns us that much "confessional work...confesses something different from what the confessor thinks he is confessing." (This is a reference to one of McGinniss' earlier books.)In Malcolm's telling, McGinniss and his lawyers do not come off well. The writers William F. Buckley Jr. and Joseph Wambaugh, testifying on behalf of McGinniss, do not come off well. Buckley, asked by opposing counsel to define a lie, begins a discourse on Sissela Bok and Thomas Aquinas. Malcolm's discussion of MacDonald is fascinating; she is agnostic on the subject of his guilt or innocence, preferring to focus on his rhetorical blandness and the ways in which Fatal Vision foisted bizarre yet hackneyed notions of psychopathology onto him. She is struck by the graceful way he eats vending machine powdered doughnuts in a prison interview: "He handled the doughnuts - breaking off pieces and unaccountably keeping the powdered sugar under control - with the delicate dexterity of a veterinarian fixing a broken wing." Hopeful that Malcolm will write a flattering book about him, MacDonald sends her long, "unrelievedly windy" missives. "A terrible starkness and bottom-of-life direness permeated these unutterably boring letters that was like the obliterating reality of the paintings of Francis Bacon." Trying to understand how such a supposedly pathological killer can be so vapid, she finds an explanation in literature, from Philip Roth's The Counterlife: "Most people...are absolutely unoriginal, and [the novelist's:] job is to make them appear otherwise." Truman Capote and Joseph Mitchell got lucky: they found in Perry Smith and Joe Gould members "of the wonderful race of auto-fictionalizers." McGinniss, realizing he had a dud in MacDonald - a character unsuited to good nonfiction, rather than a natural Raskolnikov - and could not "prod him into being interesting," succumbed to an unjustified degree of artifice. In most journalism, Malcolm writes, "the writer ultimately tires of the subject's self-serving story, and substitutes a story of his own." As long as Malcolm is the journalist, I wouldn't complain.
Well, I read this. And as I initially suspected I would, I hated it. I had just finished Fatal Vision, which includes a rebuttal to this very book - and like any good journalism student, I knew I had to read it to get the other side of the story.I don't take Malcolm's central argument as offensive. It's true that journalists work on very shaky moral ground, all the time. And some of her reporting was very good. Reading McGinniss's letters to MacDonald really surprised me - he seemingly went out of his way to make Jeff think that he was still his best friend, and that I found upsetting. In fact, I would say Malcolm's case is pretty well-written and thought-provoking, if it wasn't for these couple of sentences:"I have read little of the material he has sent - trial transcripts, motions, declarations, affidavits, reports. A document arrives, I glance at it, see words like "bloody syringe," "blue threads," "left chest puncture," "unidentified fingerprints," "Kimberly's urine," and add it to the pile. I know I cannot learn anything about MacDonald's guilt or innocence from the material. It is like looking for proof or disproof of the existence of God in a flower-- it depends on how you read the evidence. If you start out with a presumption of guilt, you read the documents one way, and another way if you presume his innocence. The material does not 'speak for itself.'"WHAT??? With those sentences, Malcolm lost any credibility she had with me. Why? Because she simply did not do her job. She made a claim she could not support, NOT due to lack of material, but because she was lazy. She wouldn't read the physical evidence. As anyone who has read Fatal Vision knows, as anyone who was at that trial or on that jury or who worked on that case for years knows, the reason people think MacDonald is guilty is the physical evidence. The fact that she could just write all of that off -- that she thought it was below her, even though it convinced an entire jury and numerous judges and investigators, even though what hung in the balance was the murder of three people -- makes me feel nothing but disgust for her and this book.Plain and simple, she was sloppy. And the first rule that all reporters learn is that if you screw up your reporting, you will lose your credibility. Always call that extra source. Always walk that extra block. Always walk up to one more person. Always READ ALL THE EVIDENCE.So that pissed me off. As well as this quote: "the journalist confines himself to the clean, gentlemanly work of exposing the griefs and shames of others."What an idiotic statement. Did she not just write a whole book on how messy and ungentlemanly journalism can be? Oy vey. I cannot handle this woman.UPDATE 9/9/2012: I've been thinking more about this book since reading A Wilderness of Error and I wanted to add to it. The truth is that I DO find parts of Malcolm's central argument offensive. The first line: "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."Um, no. I'm a journalist and I think what I do is completely morally defensible. I ask people questions, I get answers and I write them down. I don't take statements out of context. I make my intentions clear to every interview subject. I write what I learn, truthfully. And if I break any of these rules, I deserve to be called out for it. Journalism is central to truth. It is central to the weeding out of corruption, deception and ignorance. When journalists and their work contribute to those things instead of fighting them, then they are NOT journalists and what they do is NOT journalism. Janet Malcolm's self-indulgent book does nothing to help elucidate the motives of journalism. Instead, it proves her to be a writer more committed to writing out every convoluted thought in her head than to finding the truth. I find her book to be morally indefensible, not my profession.
What do You think about The Journalist And The Murderer (2004)?
Journalists hated this book, and by extension Malcolm, sufficiently that she found few allies in the fourth estate during her own libel trial. But it strikes me as an intelligent and philosophical take on the nature of the relationship between journalist and subject.One does not need to wholly buy into Malcolm's conclusions to recognize the conflicting agendas of journalist and source. Or to see that the journalist, to preserve access, often will mislead the subject about how much in conflict they really are.Since I primarily write history, my subjects are usually too dead to object too strenuously to what I've written about them. But I've also been on the other side, having had inside information and been amazed at how reporting on a subject could be so wrong, either factually or just in mischaracterization.This is the kind of book that leads one to thinking on a subject long after the book is finished. It's also a great reminder to both subject and writer to proceed with humility.
—Kevin A.
Late last year I made a crack at Fatal Vision, a behemoth of a book about the case against Jeff MacDonald for the brutal murder of his family. Author Joe McGinniss' case is so incredibly biased and poorly argued that I gave up a few hundred pages in. The Journalist and the Murderer explores the relationship (and subsequent civil suit) between McGinniss and MacDonald as a tool to discuss the relationship of journalist and subject. McGinniss spent years feigning deep friendship with MacDonald while gathering evidence to write a 600 page indictment of his subject. Was he unethical? Did he lie? Is this illegal? Who is the journalist responsible to? This book/essay is not a rehashing of the murder case, and those looking for more insight into whether MacDonald may or may not be guilty will be left disappointed. Which is exactly why I absolutely loved it.
—Caroline
This is a chillingly unvarnished look at the highest-stakes journalistic projects and their perils. I give it four stars because it succeeded at provoking me to think hard about what I do (I'm also a journalist).That does not mean, however, that I agree with all of Malcolm's points. All journalists should not, as she asserts, acknowledge that what they do is "morally indefensible." People's very lives have been saved by reporters, to say nothing of their efforts in covering civil rights protests, the Vietnam War, Watergate, the Ferguson riots and on and on.This passage, on convicted murderer Jeff MacDonald's correspondence with her, also smacks of arrogance:"I have read little of the material he has sent - trial transcripts, motions, declarations, affidavits, reports. A document arrives, I glance at it, see words like "bloody syringe," "blue threads," "left chest puncture," "unidentified fingerprints," "Kimberly's urine," and add it to the pile. I know I cannot learn anything about MacDonald's guilt or innocence from the material. It is like looking for proof or disproof of the existence of God in a flower-- it depends on how you read the evidence. If you start out with a presumption of guilt, you read the documents one way, and another way if you presume his innocence. The material does not 'speak for itself.'"I think a judge would beg to differ.
—Rachel
