The Journalist and the Murderer, Janet Malcolm
The Journalist and the Murderer, Janet Malcolm
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The Journalist and the Murderer

Author: Janet Malcolm

Narrator: Marguerite Gavin

Unabridged: 4 hr 50 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 02/24/2015


Synopsis

Janet Malcolm delves into 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. Examining the always uneasy, sometimes tragic relationship that exists between journalist and subject, Malcolm finds that neither journalist nor subject can avoid the moral impasse that is built into the journalistic situation.

This book is a work of journalism as well as an essay on journalism: it at once exemplifies and dissects its subject. In her interviews with the leading and subsidiary characters in the MacDonald-McGinniss case, Malcolm is always aware of herself as a player in a game that she cannot lose. The journalist-subject encounter has always troubled journalists, but never before has it been looked at so unflinchingly and so ruefully. Hovering over the narrative is the MacDonald murder case itself. The Journalist and the Murderer derives from and reflects many of the dominant intellectual concerns of our time, and it will have a particular appeal for those who cherish the odd, the off-center, and the unsolved.

About Janet Malcolm

Janet Malcolm (1934-2021) was the author of many books, including In the Freud Archives; The Journalist and the Murderer; Two Lives: Alice and Gertrude, which won the 2008 PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography; and Forty-One False Starts, which was a finalist for the 2013 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism. She was a frequent contributor to the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books. In 2017, Malcolm received the Gold Medal for Belles Lettres and Criticism from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Lisa on May 05, 2015

As you can see from previous reviews, the author makes a number of bizarre statements in this book. I do not complain that she stays resolutely neutral-leaning-toward-innocent on Jeffrey MacDonald's guilt, because this book isn't supposed to be about MacDonald's guilt, it's supposed to be about Joe......more

Goodreads review by Michael on September 25, 2024

(September 2020): The FX miniseries documentary A Wilderness of Error, based on Errol Morris' deeply flawed re-examination of the Jeffrey MacDonald murders, compelled me to revisit -- for the fourth time! -- Janet Malcolm's now-legendary treatise on the subject-journalist relationship. Every reading......more

Goodreads review by Mommalibrarian on July 09, 2013

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......more

Goodreads review by Rachael on January 20, 2024

I'm not sure why it took me this long to finally read this classic, brief book on the ethics of the journalist-subject relationship. This was a book mentioned often by my professors when I was in journalism school, but only now (through the course of research for a PhD program I'm in) did I get a ch......more

Goodreads review by James on September 21, 2007

Jeff was accused of killing his wife and 2 children, after 8 long years he was convicted. Joe McGinniss wrote "Fatal Vision" about that murder and trial. Jeff then sued McGinniss for libel, a hung jury favored the murderer over the journalist, 5 to 1. This book is about the deception journalists pra......more