"Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows what he does is morally indefensible."
This is a thought-provoking look at a murder case that has held the nation's attention for over 50 years. It also examines the process that journalists employ to get a story, and the resulting effects it ultimately has on the written product. It is something that readers should keep in mind as they read nonfiction books. I for one, read true crime and have noticed that most authors of this genre are not completely objective. Interesting ideas and still relevant. ( )

A dense, leaned, and thoroughly illuminating book. At less than two hundred pages, this one is a slow read that deserves your full attention. Malcom begins by disabusing the reader of much of the myths associated with the psychology behind journalism and book writing: it's faux-confessional nature, it's necessary betrayals. This might have been enough, but Malcom's an erudite enough author to take these ideas to all sorts of places, from Freudian psychoanalysis to the differences between literature and real life.

This isn't to say that I agree with everything that Malcom puts forth here: she seems, at one point, to argue that real people are both more ambiguous and more tediously predictable than literary characters, a contradiction I can't quite square. And it's likely that readers will probably come to their own conclusions about the murder case discussed in this book before they finish it, a disquieting but wholly predictable parallel to the defendant we meet in its pages. But the author's ability to draw out multiple enormously important intellectual lines of argument when any one of them might have made a good-enough book marks her as an intellect of the first order. The fact that she seems to keep these arguments both cogent and separate throughout the text testifies to her ability as a writer. Janet Malcom was undoubtedly the real thing.

It's also worth noting that she doesn't exempt herself from the theories presented here: as "The Journalist and the Murderer" draws to a close, she expresses her own boredom and emotional exhaustion with the project. This seems like a brave move, and one she did not necessarily have to take. We meet many not-so-honorable people in the pages of this brief work -- including one that may have murdered his family -- and relatively few honest ones, an acerbic, socially committed college professor who also considered writing a book on the events described in the book being among perhaps the best candidates for that distinction. Another, probably, is the author herself, who deserves real credit for taking a hard, honest look at the unavoidable contradictions of her chosen profession. Unsettling in the extreme, but recommended. ( )

"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 ( )

Interesting point of view. ( )

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. ( )