Five Journalists and a Murderer: The Effects of a Killer Narrative
As a young journalist still in the early days of her career, I’ve been blessed with more positive experiences than negative ones. From the start, my journey has been full of meaningful lessons and I’ve had little reason to doubt my career choice. But when my eyes skimmed over these words on the first page of a book assigned for my Ethics in Journalism class, I needed to take a five minute break to process what I had just read before diving back in for more:
“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.”
The sharpness of these two sentences from the opening paragraph of Janet Malcolm’s “The Journalist and the Murderer” does not seem to have dulled since its publication in 1990, and I can almost guarantee it has haunted the subconscious of many who admire, aspire to be and/or support the free press before it took up residence in mine. It’s a harsh judgment, one directed at “Fatal Vision” author Joe McGinniss for his “cruel deception” of convicted triple-murderer Jeffrey MacDonald, duping him into thinking the two were the best of friends while McGinniss, who was hired to write a book about MacDonald, secretly harbored mixed feelings about his new friend’s innocence.
Though these words have definitely shaken my view of the journalism world as I know it—most of Malcolm’s words have—I don’t really agree with the statement or its argument. The bare bones of her statement, that all journalists who are intelligent enough to be self-aware understand that the moral core of their profession is indefensible and therefore inherently wrong, are misconstrued, misinformed and surprisingly hypocritical, especially coming from a journalist.
Malcolm seems to have very little faith in her own profession. Journalists are, in the opinion of myself and I’m sure many others, remain on the front lines of the fight to protect the First Amendment and have all but sworn a sacred oath to pursue and uphold the truth. Multiple times throughout the decade-long MacDonald-McGinniss entanglement, McGinniss made his motive clear: his only moral obligation was to the truth. As I read Malcolm’s account of events, I found myself agreeing more and more with the likes of William F. Buckley Jr. and Joseph Wambaugh, writers who testified as expert witnesses on behalf of McGinniss and the ethics regarding his methods. Wambaugh, citing the pivotal “category of untruth,” explained that under certain circumstances, telling a subject what they want to hear in order to keep the crucial information coming is just par for the journalistic course. To bring this nugget of knowledge into context with a more current example: President Donald Trump and his relationship with the media specifically comes to mind. As a journalist, extracting information from a sort of sociopathic source while maintaining good relations, as described initially by McGinniss and later supported by Wambaugh, is a delicate dance, “an exercise in ferocious, mutual exploitation, for enormous stakes,” as the Washington Post’s Gene Weingartner put it. This, however unfortunate, is quite reminiscent of the ways we’ve seen the media walk on eggshells around the Trump Administration: a perfect balance that is imperative for the end goal of truth-telling to be reached.
Discussing MacDonald, McGinniss and Malcolm without touching upon Errol Morris’ book “A Wilderness of Error” would be remiss, as his interpretation of the narrative throws a wrench in the ethics dichotomy of McGinniss vs. Malcolm. I agree with Weingartner’s views on the Morris book: I admire his skill in reporting but not his book, which tries in vain to exonerate MacDonald and convince the reader of his innocence. I don’t agree with Morris’s argument and I’m not particularly fond of his arguments, as explained by Weingartner and Dan Kennedy in his review of Morris’s book, but one thing I can get behind is Morris’s view of contempt for Malcolm’s disregard for the truth behind the evidence of the case—she dismisses the piles of information and evidence she’s been given without even looking at them, comparing it to searching for proof the God’s existence in a flower. This kind of reckless ignorance of facts is exactly the kind of peril we’re still facing today, in the sandstorm of fake news that threatens to take over the journalism world.
Morris argues yet another side, this one focused more on journalistic integrity. This paragraph from Kennedy’s review particularly struck me:
“‘Is this what it all comes down to?” Morris asks. “Two journalists — one who betrays MacDonald by twisting the facts and another who tells him the facts don’t make a difference?” In the same section, he writes in response to Malcolm: “What gives journalism its authenticity and vitality is pursuit of the truth. This applies to the law, as well. The real story is in our attempt to separate fact from fiction. The real story is in our attempts to find out what really happened — no matter how difficult that might be.’”
This is the true core of journalism, the morality and integrity of it as a profession. In her book, Malcolm issues a harsh and unyielding condemnation of McGinniss and his relationship with MacDonald, both professional and personal, but in doing so she seems to overlook something much bigger. McGinniss, being side by side with MacDonald through the trial, was simultaneously exposed to new evidence and arguments as his relationship with the defendant evolved and, as the evidence mounted, McGinniss made an informed decision and based his opinion on MacDonald based on that. As a fellow journalist, I find it prudent to point out that journalists are not superheroes; we’re constantly experiencing new things and learning along with everyone else. As the evidence was presented, McGinniss formed his opinion and made up his mind just like everyone else; he just happened to also have been hired by the defendant to write a book, which was an unfortunate situation to be in. But in terms of journalistic ethics, I truly think that McGinniss acted to the best of his ability and relentlessly pursued the truth and reported on it in a manner that was appropriate considering the circumstances.