Rethinking The Journalist and the Murderer

Over the years, Janet Malcolm’s book The Journalist and the Murderer (1990) has become something of a “standard” in courses about narrative journalism and even Creative Nonfiction. As I see it, that’s partly because it raises important questions about the very thing Reading Narrative Journalism emphasizes: the relationship between the “story-form” of a given work and the “subject relation” behind it. That is, it’s about an egregious case where, in Malcolm’s telling, not only did a journalist’s own story deviate from what the subject’s story was, but that this change involve a fundamental betrayal by the journalist involved. But more shockingly, to some, was another point Malcolm added in: that this kind of betrayal happens all the time.

Needless to say, this shocks people’s common sense–and, on top of that, some orthodox thinking in the journalist trade. That is, sometimes people think that this is the journalist’s duty or obligation: to tell the participants’ story. Or, to put this another way, it’s best for the reporter to “get out of the way,” and not impose those very things I’ve been emphasizing: a “story-form, an interpretation. In what is commonly called “testimonial” journalism, for example, that is often the stated goal–to let subjects tell their own tale.  (I discuss this type of writing more fully in Chapter 5).

But if you think about that issue a bit further, you’ll realize it’s rarely quite that simple.  Indeed sometimes, journalists are under an obligation to keep their distance; sometimes their own background is radically different from those on whom they report; sometimes the journalist’s views are in tension with, or sometimes contradict, what the story’s subjects would say, themselves. That doesn’t mean one or the other is the truth. It simply means, once again, that all reporting is the making of interpretation. Tensions with subjects are inevitable: it’s a balancing act.  Sometimes, though, this balancing act seems to have gone completely haywire. And that’s the story that Malcolm’s The Journalist and the Murderer (1990) seems to tell.

Malcolm’s Story

The Journalist and the Murderer, famously, concerns the relationship between a free-lance reporter, Joe McGinniss, and a man named Jeffrey McDonald who is on trial for having murdered his wife and children. Malcolm’s story goes like this: as he prepared to go to trial, McDonald had allowed the journalist McGinniss to join his defense team in order to write a book on the case. But McGinnis, after seeming very sympathetic to McDonald–even writing him affectionate, encouraging letters suggesting he supported the defense–turned around and wrote Fatal Vision (1983), the book in which he depicted McDonald as not only guilty of the crime, but a deranged psychopath to boot. (The murder case has, as you may know, undergone many appeals.)[2] Malcolm thus criticizes McGinness for his duplicity: for sloppy research and reasoning, for betraying his subject, for relying on pseudo-scientific research, and for bringing his own personal baggage into the story.  We also learn that his publisher paid for a large settlement to McDonald in a civil suit that accused the journalist of having betrayed him.  (After a hung jury, McGinness’s publishers decided to settle.)

While we’re probably horrified by McGinness’s actions, Malcolm’s first point is actually that journalists betray their subjects all the time.  (In fact, at various points, she says that the really self-aware journalists just “shut up” about it, and go on with their work.)  She says journalists always impose their own story on what their subjects would prefer to say.  

The Limits of Her Case

Now, taken on its own grounds, The Journalist and the Murderer is a wonderfully incisive, complex, and provocative book. You’ll see it cited everywhere. In Malcolm’s vivid prose, the mundane routine of being a reporter suddenly take on the feeling of Greek melodrama (and in fact a lot of Malcolm’s imagery draws from classical mythology and drama, as well as on the highly charged vocabulary of psychoanalysis). Her book is an important reminder that the empiricist assumptions guiding so many narrative journalists really aren’t adequate to describing what happens when real persons are written up in narratives created by other people.   However, her argument can too easily create misconceptions about how narrative journalists commonly practice their craft, and why such conflicts with subjects do indeed arise.    

So let’s break down the problems with her argument. First, as I’ve already suggested, it is too easy to overlook that the core of Malcolm’s case is not simply that McGinniss preferred a different set of “facts” from his subject, Jeffrey McDonald. Rather, her more fundamental argument is that McGinniss (who is supposed to represent journalists generally) blindly imposed a different “story” than what his subject was telling, or expected McGinniss to tell.

However, Malcolm’s way of setting up such a conflict is a bit misleading.  Sure: it’s certainly the case that a journalist will, more often than not, end up with a different version of events than a subject will hold.  But that being said, we shouldn’t overlook the fact that journalists usually really do try to grasp what a story means to those in their reporting—indeed, as I’ve said from the get-go, it’s often seen as a professional imperative to understand their subject’s story. Malcolm glides over this professional obligation, I think, making all journalists look a bit like predators. (Some are, of course: but not all.)

Moreover, when reporters then decide to write a different story than a subject wants, they usually aren’t doing so as obliviously as Malcolm makes it seem. Rather, they are typically quite aware of the risks. Nevertheless, journalists are likely to think this is their job—that is, to sort out what really happened, and not to be beholden to anyone in the story per se.  This is part of the internalized professional norm most journalists carry with them. So what Malcolm is turning into a scandalous story is better understood as something that happens even when journalists are fulfilling their obligation to their readers.

Her Psychoanalytic Approach

Meanwhile, again perhaps due to her psychoanalytic lens, Malcolm can make it seem that reporters impose their own stories exclusively because they are driven by personal and unconscious desires. No doubt: that can happen. But, again, Malcolm is making a melodrama out of a much more mundane struggle at the heart of journalistic writing: the intrinsic tension between professional norms and, after all, rival versions of events that reporters often must sort out. (This in itself points to a central contradiction in Malcolm’s book:  she wants to argue that this kind of thing happens all the time, but she also wants to condemn McGinniss for doing it.)

To put this another way, by reducing everything to a battle of psyches, Malcolm actually underplays the stakes of getting a story right. The fact is that journalists come to a story not simply driven by their own inner needs, but armed with a set of working norms about news value and readers’ expectations. What this Chapter calls “Getting the Story” derives from instincts journalists develop about what their audience wants or needs to know. That is, a reporter might be investigating “why there’s so much gun violence in the poor sections of Chicago,” or “why the war in Iraq went wrong,” and so on—questions they believe their audience shares–not just something the journalist alone is curious about, or what the subject wants.    

The “Universal” Problem

That brings us back to a final problem with Malcolm’s framing: she also seems to act as if the betrayal of trust at the heart of the McGinniss-McDonald case has a universal application. In fact, it’s actually a fairly narrow example.  Why do I say that?  Well, for one thing, the business relationship McDonald and McGinniss formed is very rare, and in some news institutions it’s never allowed. For another, the fact is that different journalists work out their subject-relationships in many different ways.  Not everyone plays the role of the confidante and friend; some see their relationship as intrinsically political, as a power relationship; others choose to be more impersonal and distant.  There simply is no “one size fits all” when it comes to these relationships.

In all, the conflicts between reporters and subjects, the events they report on and what they write, are often intrinsic to the four dimensions of narrative journalism itself, but not reducible to “subjective” feelings or points of view. (You might also want to read my “Short Take” entry on “subjectivity and objectivity,” also in this Short Takes section. )   Those conflicts often derive, as I’ve been saying, from tensions between the different interpretations that exist in the very idea of what “the story” is. 

Suggested Readings: The MacDonald case, and Malcolm’s own treatment of it, is the subject of Errol Morris, A Wilderness of Error (New York: Penguin, 2012), and Kathy Roberts Forde, Literary Journalism on Trial (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2008).