The Journalist and the Murderer

Explores the relationship between journalists and their subjects, and the question of journalistic ethics, using the lawsuit of convicted murderer Jeffrey MacDonald against author Joe McGinniss. In two previous books, Janet Malcolm explored the hidden sides of, respectively, institutional psychoanalysis and Freudian biography. In this book, she examines 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, a book about the crime -- she delves into the always uneasy, sometimes tragic relationship that exists between journalist and subject. In Malcolm's view, neither journalist nor subject can avoid the moral impasse that is built into the journalistic situation. When the text first appeared, as a two-part article in The New Yorker, its thesis seemed so radical and its irony so pitiless that journalists across the country reacted as if stung.

Author(s): Janet Malcolm  

ISBN 10: 0679731830
ISBN 13: 9780679731832
Pages: 163