Janet Malcolm - The Journalist and The Murderer

The thesis of The Journalist and the Murderer is contained in its first sentence: "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."

Malcolm's example was popular non-fiction writer Joe McGinniss, author of The Selling of the President, among others; while researching his non-fiction, true crime book Fatal Vision, McGinniss lived with the defense team of former Green Beret doctor Jeffrey MacDonald, then on trial for the 1970 murders of his two daughters and pregnant wife. In the published Fatal Vision, McGinniss concluded that MacDonald was a sociopath and had been unbalanced by amphetamines when he slew his family. McGinniss drew upon the work of social critic Christopher Lasch to construct a portrait of MacDonald as a "pathological narcissist".

Malcolm contended that McGinniss was pressed into this strategy for professional and structural reasons — by MacDonald's "lack of vividness" as a real-life character who would be carrying the book. "As every journalist will confirm," Malcolm writes,

"MacDonald's uninterestingness is not unusual at all...When a journalist fetches up against someone like, all he can do is flee and hope that a more suitable subject will turn up soon. In the MacDonald-McGinniss case we have an instance of a journalist who apparently found out too late that the subject of his book was not up to scratch — not a member of the wonderful race of auto-fictionalizers, like Joseph Mitchell's Joe Gould and Truman Capote's Perry Smith, on whom the "non-fiction novel" depends for its life...The solution that McGinniss arrived at for dealing with MacDonald's characterlessness was not a satisfactory one, but it had to do."

Per Malcolm, it was to conceal this deficit that McGinniss quoted liberally from Lasch's 1979 study The Culture of Narcissism. This, to her, was a professional sin. McGinniss' moral sin, his "indefensible" act in her view, was to pretend to a belief in MacDonald's innocence, long after he'd become convinced of the man's guilt.

The book created a sensation when in March 1989 it appeared in two parts in The New Yorker magazine. Roundly criticized upon first publication, the book is still controversial, although it has come to be regarded as a classic, and ranks ninety-seventh in The Modern Library's list of the twentieth century's "100 Best Works of Nonfiction". As Douglas McCollum wrote in the Columbia Journalism Review, "In the decade after Malcolm's essay appeared, her once controversial theory became received wisdom."