The Journalist and the Murderer (1990)

I was initially drawn to Janet Malcolm's odd and striking meditation on the moralities of journalism by my interest in the Jeffrey MacDonald "acid is groovy" murders case. The focus of Malcolm's book appears at first to be the lawsuit that MacDonald filed against Joe McGinniss, who wrote a bestselling book about the case, Fatal Vision, one that was extremely damning for MacDonald. But I took the thing home and read it that day because of the now famous first line of it, which I read standing there in the bookstore on a Saturday morning browsing visit: "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." The civil suit on which this slender volume turns was based not on charges of libel—how, after all, does one harm the reputation of a convicted and imprisoned murderer?—but for fraud, and this is the crux of the issue that Malcolm knuckles into with an icy ferocity and an uncanny but perfectly informed sense for the dynamics that exist between journalist and subject. Uncanny, that is, maybe until you realize she has been a staff writer and professional journalist at The New Yorker for decades. Then the only thing uncanny is that she's telling the truth. Of course, the concerns she addresses may seem now, in this day and age of ever-worsening corruptions of journalism, to bear some lamentable air of the quaint. (For myself, I don't count even the New York Times or NPR as ipso facto credible any longer, let alone the Washington Post, let alone television news, let alone Fox—a state of affairs that only makes me sad.) But the passion and energy that Malcolm brings to her analysis does at least serve as some tonic. Here's someone who actually, really cares about the deepest issues of it. Malcolm, of course, has herself been the target of a civil suit for alleged journalistic improprieties (by a cultish psychoanalyst, Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, on charges of misrepresenting him in quotation, but more on that down the road) and remains scorned in various quarters as a dishonest fantasist, which adds an intriguing level of complexity and self-interest just under the surface to her arguments here. Ultimately, the two cases are based on entirely different issues, and think what you may of her she is inarguably onto something here that is vital to the enterprise of journalism, as anyone who has practiced it even in passing has had the opportunity to understand. There is an inevitable neediness and vulnerability between subject and journalist, however scrupulously professional both may strive to be, a dynamic between the two of them, however brief their relationship may be, that is as complex and fraught as that between married couples or between therapists and patients. Malcolm's ability to tease out such subtleties, even as her language rises to levels of carefully calibrated thunder (see again her opening sentence), is really nothing short of breathtaking. It's not going too far to call this essential on multiple levels.

In case it's not at the library.