The Journalist And The Murderer

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a b Finch, Charles (January 11, 2023). "Janet Malcolm Remembers". The New York Times . Retrieved January 11, 2023. As a journalist I've often experienced the condition Janet Malcolm dissects so masterfully here--the way my job--and just the act of writing 'nonfiction' itself--requires me to don a persona with interview subjects that will give me the best chance of getting the information I need for a story, or to shape the events I report on into a narrative that will give satisfaction to my readers. Malcolm isn't talking about breaches of journalistic ethics here, but rather, she examines the simple, unavoidable necessity journalists have to make their stories compelling. Journalists do this by choosing sides, even if they believe themselves to be balanced (or "fair and balanced," as some would say). They tell the story in a way that bolsters their points of view and that appeals to their readers. Just committing the act of writing one word after another commits a writer to a certain set of conclusions. Malcolm examines this process with a greatness of heart that left me with a far greater awareness of the way I've been making these choices throughout my career.

The Journalist and the Murderer—I - The New Yorker The Journalist and the Murderer—I - The New Yorker

Smith, Dinitia (September 29, 2004). "Gardner Botsford, 87, Dies; Editor at The New Yorker". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331 . Retrieved June 17, 2021. 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. He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people’s vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse. Like the credulous widow who wakes up one day to find the charming young man and all her savings gone, so the consenting subject of a piece of nonfiction writing learns—when the article or book appears— his hard lesson. Journalists justify their treachery in various ways according to their temperaments. The more pompous talk about freedom of speech and “the public’s right to know”; the least talented talk about Art; the seemliest murmur about earning a living. Even though Malcolm had made some good points on other matters (sociology/psychology) in her book, I don't think I agree with her views on the issues of journalism. I wasn't particularly interested in the MacDonald murder case. Personally, I don't think there is a lot that one can learn from it. And when one can't do that, the crime is just used as a 'spectacle' to the public when it is being publicised in the ways that MacDonald's case was. I am disappointed, but it is early and we expect more to come,” the dissident said, adding that he believed it was now up to Congress to pass targeted sanctions against Prince Mohammed under the global Magnitsky Act.The book provoked a wide-ranging professional debate when it was serialized in The New Yorker magazine. Joe McGinniss described Malcolm's "omissions, distortions and outright misstatements of fact" as "numerous and egregious" in his rebuttal. [20] As The New York Times reported in March 1989, Malcolm's "declarations provoked outrage among authors, reporters and editors, who rushed last week to distinguish themselves from the journalists Malcolm was describing. They accused her of tarring all in the profession when she was really aiming at everyone but themselves." [1] Although roundly criticized upon first publication—by both newspaper reviewers and media observers like former CBS News president Fred W. Friendly, who described the book's "weakness" and "crabbed vision"—it was also defended by a number of fellow writers. These included the journalists Jessica Mitford and Nora Ephron. [21] Her controversial premise that every journalist was in the business of "gaining [a subject's] trust and betraying them without remorse" has since been accepted by journalists like Gore Vidal and Susan Orlean. Douglas McCollam wrote in the Columbia Journalism Review, "Gore Vidal called source betrayal 'the iron law' of journalism", while Orlean "endorsed Malcolm's thesis as a necessary evil." McCollam further wrote, "In the decade after Malcolm's essay appeared, her once controversial theory became received wisdom." He also writes that "I think both the profession and subjects have paid a high price for our easy acceptance of Malcolm's moral calculus." [2] In her study of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes (The Silent Woman, 1992), Malcolm wrote that the readers and writers of biography were each impelled by the same “voyeurism and busybodyism … obscured by an apparatus of scholarship designed to give the enterprise an appearance of banklike blandness and solidity”. For a writer, she had a considerable distrust of writing. When Hughes (to whom Malcolm was sympathetic) complained about some facts in the book, she replied apologetically to say that his letter “was another, and most compelling, illustration of the impossibility of ever getting the hang of it entirely, and the fundamental problem of omniscient narration in nonfiction”. James, Caryn (March 27, 1994). "The Importance of Being Biased". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331 . Retrieved June 18, 2021.

THE JOURNALIST AND THE MURDERER | Kirkus Reviews

Despite being written 30 years ago, in an age before social media, podcasts and (the concept of) "fake news", Janet Malcolm's reflection on journalistic morality and true crime still has resonance and bite. Charles Finch wrote in 2023 "it seems safe to say that the two most important long-form journalists this country produced in the second half of the last century were Joan Didion and Janet Malcolm." [30] Personal life [ edit ] a b c d Seelye, Katharine Q. (June 17, 2021). "Janet Malcolm, Provocative Journalist With a Piercing Eye, Dies at 86". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331 . Retrieved June 17, 2021. But when he was convicted and read McGinnis' account of his time with Macdonald, he realised that his "friend" had always believed he was guilty of killing his wife and children.

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The Journalist and the Murderer was similarly controversial. Starting out in the New Yorker in 1989 and published as a book in 1990, it explored the case of Jeffrey MacDonald, a doctor charged and later convicted for killing his wife and two daughters, who became friendly with a journalist, Joe McGinniss, during his trial. MacDonald tasked McGinniss with writing a sympathetic book about his case, but McGinniss became convinced of his guilt and wrote about that instead. Malcolm held up McGinniss as an example of the inherent duplicitousness of journalists in their work, a categorisation McGinniss disputed for decades. “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,” she wrote. ALTHOUGH writers and publishers like to grumble about the proliferation of libel lawsuits in this country, few would seriously propose that anything be done to reverse the trend. The Ayatollah’s death sentence on Salman Rushdie brings into relief the primitive feeling that lies behind every libel suit, and makes the writer only too grateful for the mechanism the law provides for transforming the displeased subject’s impulse to kill him into the move civilized aim of extracting large sums of money from him. Although the money is rarely collected—most libel suits end in defeat for the plaintiff or in a modest settlement—the lawsuit itself functions as a powerful therapeutic agent, ridding the subject of his feelings of humiliating powerlessness and restoring to him his cheer and amour propre. From the lawyer who takes him into his care he immediately receives the relief that a sympathetic hearing of one’s grievances affords. Conventional psychotherapy would soon veer off into an unpleasurable examination of the holes in one’s story, but the law cure never ceases to be gratifying; in fact, what the lawyer says and writes on his client’s behalf is gratifying beyond the latter’s wildest expectations. The rhetoric of advocacy law is the rhetoric of the late-night vengeful brooding which in life rarely survives the skeptical light of morning but in a lawsuit becomes inscribed, as if in stone, in the bellicose documents that accrue while the lawsuit takes its course, and proclaims with every sentence “I am right! I am right! I am right!” On the other side, meanwhile, the same orgy of self-justification is taking place. The libel defendant, after an initial anxious moment (we all feel guilty of something, and being sued stirs the feeling up), comes to see, through the ministrations of his lawyer-therapist, that he is completely in the right and has nothing to fear. Of pleasurable reading experiences there may be none greater than that afforded by a legal document written on one’s behalf. A lawyer will argue for you as you could never argue for yourself, and, with his lawyer’s rhetoric, give you a feeling of certitude that you could never obtain for yourself from the language of everyday discourse. People who have never sued anyone or been sued have missed a narcissistic pleasure that is not quite like any other.” The administration’s statements also alluded to other acts by Saudi Arabia, beyond Khashoggi’s murder, in what appeared to be a nod to reports that the CIA has intervened on at least two occasions – in Norway and in Canada – to warn that dissidents and activists were possibly under threat.

Janet Malcolm, author of The Journalist and the Murderer

Trump defended and brushed aside the findings of his own intelligence agencies, even after it became widely known through media reports that the CIA had concluded with a medium- to high-degree of confidence that Prince Mohammed had approved the murder. Malcolm’s personal involvement in the case began in 1987, when McGinniss’ legal team sourced her to write a report on the MacDonald v. McGinniss case. She accepted, but McGinniss aborted the plan after only an initial five-hour interview. Malcolm decided to still write about the case, finding it useful subject matter for an analysis of the hidden motivations and power relationships intrinsic to any piece of journalistic storytelling. This is a lazy excuse for a book. It purports to explore the questions of the responsibility of the writer to the subject, truthfulness, libel, and freedom of the press. It consists of a scattered set of summaries of the author's interviews with the lawyers and principles in a court case in which a convicted murderer successfully sued the author of his true crime story 'for fraud and breach of contract - as an attempt "to set a new precedent whereby a reporter or author would be legally obligated to disclose his state of mind and attitude toward his subject during the process of writing and research."" The author maintains his "only obligation from the beginning was to the truth" and that the legal precedent set by a decision against him would result in a "grave threat to established journalistic freedoms". In the published Fatal Vision, McGinniss depicted MacDonald as a "womanizer" and a "publicity-seeker", [14] as well as a sociopath who, unbalanced by amphetamines, had murdered his family. But to Malcolm, MacDonald in person seemed sturdy, unremarkable, and incapable of such a crime. [15] McGinniss drew upon the works of a number of social critics, including the moralist Christopher Lasch, to construct a portrait of MacDonald as a "pathological narcissist." [16]In the MacDonald-McGinniss case we have an instance of a journalist who apparently found out too late (or let himself find out too late) that the subject of his book was not up to scratch -- not suitable for a work of nonfiction, not a member of the wonderful race of auto-fictionalizers, like Joseph Mitchell's Joe Gould or Truman Capote's Perry Smith, on whom the New Journalism and the 'nonfiction novel' depend for their life. MacDonald was simply a guy like the rest of us, with nothing to offer but a tedious and improbable story about his innocence of a bad crime." This letter, like the overture to an opera, announces all the themes of the coming correspondence. Until close to the publication of “Fatal Vision,” when McGinniss apparently felt he could afford to be a bit cold and careless with MacDonald, he wrote letters assuring MacDonald of his friendship, commiserating with him about his situation, offering him advice about his appeal, requesting information for the book, and fretting about competing writers. The passages dealing with this last concern—a very common one among writers (every writer thinks someone else is working on his subject; it is part of the paranoid state of mind necessary for the completion of the infinitely postponable task of writing)—make especially painful reading, in a correspondence full of painful moments. McGinniss had a real cause for worry: two people were actually planning to write books about the MacDonald case. One was Bob Keeler, who had been covering the case for Newsday since the early seventies; the other was Freddy Kassab, the stepfather of the murdered woman, who was looking for an as-told-to writer to set forth his version. But the measures that McGinniss, his agent, and his publisher took to insure that no one but McGinniss would come out with a book about MacDonald were extraordinarily active.

Saudi crown prince approved Khashoggi murder but US finds Saudi crown prince approved Khashoggi murder but

Roiphe, Katie (September 23, 2007). "Portrait of a Marriage". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331 . Retrieved June 18, 2021. In August 1989, United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in San Francisco agreed with a lower court in dismissing a libel lawsuit that Masson had filed against Malcolm, The New Yorker and Alfred A. Knopf. [19] It based the assessment on the prince’s “control of decision-making in the kingdom, the direct involvement of a key adviser and members of [the prince’s] protective detail in the operation, and [his] support for using violent measures to silence dissidents abroad, including Khashoggi”. Stout, David, The New York Times, "Malcolm's Notes and a Child at Play", August 30, 1995". New York Times. August 30, 1995 . Retrieved January 5, 2012. Macdonald had considered McGinnis a friend after he was invited behind the scenes with him and his defence team ahead of the murder trial.In 1999, Malcolm looked at the US legal system in The Crime of Sheila McGough, then delved into her own life a little more in 2001’s Reading Chekhov, which interspersed scenes from the Russian writer’s life with her own travels in Russia. In 2007, she published a book on Gertrude Stein and Alice B Toklas called Two Lives, and followed it with two last essay collections, Forty-one False Starts and Nobody’s Looking at You. After slowing to once a year, her final piece for the New Yorker was published in 2019. The experts said it’s all right to tell the man something you don’t believe in, as long as you’re getting more information from him, for the sake of the project. I listened throughout the two and a half hours, astounded that that would be set forth in a courtroom as being the kind of principle that writers or lawyers or juries should be guided by. We cannot do whatever is necessary. We have to do what is right. Although Saudi officials had pre-planned an unspecified operation against Khashoggi, we do not know how far in advance Saudi officials decided to harm him,” the report concluded. Trump was reported to have bragged to the Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward that he had protected the crown prince from congressional scrutiny, telling Woodward: “I saved his ass.” If [the subject] has nothing to lose anymore from his encounters with writers, a writer has little to gain from him."