The Journalist and the Murderer

The Journalist and the Murderer is a multi-part essay originally written by Janet Malcolm for The New Yorker, published in book form in 1990. Examining the relationship between subject and journalist, Malcolm portrays journalism as an inherently psychopathic profession, arguing that it capitalizes on a distortion of truth under the guise of objectivity. To accomplish this, Malcolm juxtaposes the lawsuit of a convicted murderer named Jeffrey MacDonald with a book written about the crime by Joe McGinniss called Fatal Vision. By excoriating both parties’ depiction of truth in this case, her essay is both itself a work of journalism and a commentary on the nature of journalism. Malcolm interviews the accused, the defendant, the jury, and the witnesses, demonstrating how the journalist, by nature of his or her role, always retains the ultimate position from which to synthesize primary and secondary information, empowered by the misguided trope of the objective reporter.

The essay begins with historical context to the parties in the case. In 1979, Jeffrey MacDonald was convicted for murdering his pregnant wife and two young daughters in 1970. During his arraignment process, he became close with journalist Joe McGinniss, asking him to write a book about the trial. McGinniss observed the trial process and eventually became a member of MacDonald’s defense team.

In a sudden betrayal in 1983, McGinniss published Fatal Vision, in which he portrayed MacDonald as a sociopath who had clearly committed the murders he was accused for. MacDonald retaliated by suing McGinnis for fraud, submitting evidence in the form of dozens of letters exchanged during his time in prison in which McGinniss extended his sympathy and support while covertly extracting subject matter for his book. The fraud trial culminated in a hung jury and a settlement for $325,000 paid to MacDonald.



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.

Malcolm starts her analysis by comparing the journalist’s position of power to an experiment by Stanley Milgram. In his experiment, each subject was told to apply what they believed were successive painful electric shocks, increasing in voltage, to an invisible second subject. At the end, their debriefing revealed that the experiment was actually to see how a perceived power relationship influences the human authoritarian impulse. Malcolm then argues that journalists enjoy an analogous power relationship with their subjects because they open a window of dialogue only to seize full control of the narrative that emerges via the simple fact of being the one preordained to translate truth and event into well-ordered language. The journalist, further, is able to manipulate tone, occasion, and other aspects of style critical to how readers process and perceive truth value in a text.

After explicating this model for the journalist-subject power struggle, Malcolm recalls the suspect behavior of McGinniss and his lawyers. Choosing not to focus on the question of MacDonald’s guilt or innocence, she analyzes McGinniss’ style of controlling the narrative of Fatal Vision by applying clinical psychological concepts, namely those of psychopathy, to what she observed to be MacDonald’s truly banal personality and behavior. She fixates on uncannily monotonous aspects of MacDonald’s behavior that contradict McGinniss’ account of an outrageous, extroverted psychopath—for example, the meticulous way he ate powdered donuts during police interviews, handling them delicately like an injured bird. She also recalls a series of stream-of-consciousness appeals MacDonald had written in letters and mailed to her, noting that they represented disordered thinking not correlated to the psychopathic condition, and a deep, underlying helplessness and incompetence. Malcolm then muses that in the majority of journalism, the writer must eventually synthesize banality and self-contradiction into a consistent narrative, and in doing so, consciously or unconsciously substitutes in his or her own tropes and preconceptions.



McGinniss, Malcolm argues, simply realized MacDonald was an uninteresting character and used the power of language and the privilege of the journalist’s position, along with the accepted ambiguity of the interview as a truth-extracting narrative device, to willfully distort how the public perceived MacDonald. She further notes that since most lives are unoriginal, there is an almost necessary and unquestioned layer of distortion through which truth must pass to successfully propagate as a form of media. Malcolm’s essay ultimately poses no formula for how to make the journalist’s power relationship with the subject more equitable but is rather an exposé about the paucity of mechanisms that the public has for being able to question narrative truth. If there is a model for a “good” journalist, Malcolm is unable to settle on one. Rather, she models journalistic integrity as a continuum between banality, raw data, and interpretation that the journalist must acknowledge and negotiate to produce adequate representational work.