Janet Malcolm changed journalism by taking it seriously as a literary form — not once, but twice — in one of the craft’s few “first rough drafts” of its own history, her 1990 essay The Journalist and the Murderer.
Most famously, in the opening line she exposed the dark heart of modern journalistic practice: “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.”
First in The New Yorker and then in a book, it challenges the primacy of “getting the story” over the ethical principle that (per Australia’s code) mandates “fair, responsible and honest means to obtain material”.
The sentences make journalists shiver (plenty tweeted them out when news of her death broke last week), but most shrug them off with a “you gotta do what you gotta do” je-m’en-foutisme (to use a Malcolm-ism).
Damned both ways: access journalism is more usually critiqued for its reluctance to burn sources. (Among other journalistic sins, it’s blamed for helping along the Iraq War.)
The source is often a willing victim: “Something seems to happen to people when they meet a journalist … One would think that extreme wariness and caution would be the order of the day, but in fact childish trust and impetuosity are far more common.”
However, Malcolm reported, in the outside world it all seems ugly, nasty, fake — perhaps journalistic “grooming”.
Her critique echoed again this year in the controversy over BBC journalist Martin Bashir using forged documents to win the “there were three of us in the marriage” interview with Princess Diana.
The essay is a collision of journalistic heavyweights: the analytical, writerly Malcolm v the popular “new journalism” entertainer Joe McGinniss, the moment when the very serious school knocked out the pretensions of “new journalism” as the realist literary form of outrage (as claimed by Tom Wolfe in his 1975 edited canon).
The “journalist”: McGinniss, creator in 1969 of the inside-the-political-war-room genre with The Selling of the President; shaper of the psychological true-crime blockbuster in the 1980s; interweaver of sport, society and politics in 1999’s The Miracle of Castel di Sangro; star of the 2012 Sydney Writers’ Festival promoting his biography of Sarah Palin.
The “murderer”: surgeon and former Green Beret Jeffrey MacDonald, charged in 1979 with the 1970 murder of his wife and two daughters. In echoes of the Manson murders zeitgeist, MacDonald claimed innocence, blaming drugged-up hippies. Irresistible yarn!
Hubris? Narcissism? MacDonald sought vindication through McGinniss, giving him total access through the trial, becoming (he thought) friends due to what Malcolm snidely calls McGinniss’ “customary ingratiation”. Yet after his conviction and sentence, when Fatal Vision appeared in bookstores in 1983, he found it concluded he was guilty as charged.
MacDonald sued McGinniss for fraud. Five out of six members of a hung jury backed the murderer over the journalist, prompting the publisher to settle with an out-of-court payment.
McGinniss’ lawyer went looking to expose the threat, finding Malcolm, already a star in American literary journalism, with two funny and illuminating books on psychoanalysis and Freud (and herself unsuccessfully sued for fabricating quotes). She would later brilliantly bring the literary cut-up style to the journalism profile in Forty-One False Starts.
The core problem, Malcolm found with McGinniss’ take in 1990, was the same one identified by The New Yorker‘s Renata Adler in the 1960s with Wolfe’s claim that the realism of the new journalism was supplanting the novel: “Zippy prose about inconsequential people.”
Malcolm wrote: “Most people don’t make good subjects for journalists; MacDonald was a member of the unpromising majority rather than of the special, auto-novelised minority.” Yet, a bestseller brought readers who demanded more than the journalistic who-what-where-when-how. They demanded a novelistic why.
The result? McGinniss resorted to the pop psychoanalysis of psychopathy to make intriguing the man we would now see as an all-too-banal perpetrator of domestic violence.
The journalist was left grumbling, taking his bestsellers all the way to the bank. Two years before he died in 2014 he was still grumbling at the 2012 Sydney Writers’ Festival. The murderer remains in jail.
If, to expose a company poisoning a river and its fishers and swimmers and farmers, a journalist was to get himself hired by the company, and used the access to expose the poisoning, that would surely be a breach of the journalists’ code. But would it be wrong? Chris Warren thinks it would and the status quo is on his side. Is it really true that the quo and the code is right?