What good is journalism? Book

In 1979, Dr. Jeffrey MacDonald was convicted of the 1970 murders of his pregnant wife and two daughters, ages 5 and 2. He had asked journalist Joe McGinniss to write a book about the trial, and McGinniss was not only a close observer, but even became a member of the defense team. MacDonald and McGinniss became friends. But the publication of McGinniss' book Fatal Vision in 1983 revealed McGinniss' belief, hidden until then, that MacDonald was a lying sociopath, guilty of the murders. Furious and feeling betrayed, MacDonald sued McGinniss for fraud. As evidence he produced many sympathetic letters McGinniss had written to him in prison, proclaiming his outrage over the verdict. That civil trial ended in a hung jury; McGinniss eventually settled and paid MacDonald $325,000. Enter journalist Janet Malcolm, whom McGinniss and his legal team solicited in 1987 to write about MacDonald v. McGinniss. Malcolm accepted, but after a five-hour interview McGinniss bailed on the project. Malcolm wrote about the case anyway, in two long New Yorker articles which became this book.

This is great journalism and wonderful writing, clear and accessible but sometimes also surprising and provocative. Malcolm is a brilliant observer of human behavior and motivations and she's not above noting her own errors of perception or flawed assumptions. Looking at the McGinniss case provides a pretext for her to examine all feature journalism as a moral enterprise, and a power relationship between journalist and subject in which the former holds all the cards. (She begins by comparing this relationship to Stanley Milgram's experiment in which test subjects were instructed to administer what they thought were increasingly painful electric shocks to others, after which they were "debriefed" or "dehoaxed," told the real purpose of the experiment, which was to see how cruelly authoritarian they could be. The journalist's subject goes through a similarly disorienting and humiliating dehoaxing when he reads the journalist's expose, she argues.) Journalism is "morally indefensible." So how are we to take her journalism? Her confessional tone makes her seem deeply honest and frank, yet she also warns us that much "confessional work...confesses something different from what the confessor thinks he is confessing." (This is a reference to one of McGinniss' earlier books.)

In Malcolm's telling, McGinniss and his lawyers do not come off well. The writers William F. Buckley Jr. and Joseph Wambaugh, testifying on behalf of McGinniss, do not come off well. Buckley, asked by opposing counsel to define a lie, begins a discourse on Sissela Bok and Thomas Aquinas. Malcolm's discussion of MacDonald is fascinating; she is agnostic on the subject of his guilt or innocence, preferring to focus on his rhetorical blandness and the ways in which Fatal Vision foisted bizarre yet hackneyed notions of psychopathology onto him. She is struck by the graceful way he eats vending machine powdered doughnuts in a prison interview: "He handled the doughnuts - breaking off pieces and unaccountably keeping the powdered sugar under control - with the delicate dexterity of a veterinarian fixing a broken wing." Hopeful that Malcolm will write a flattering book about him, MacDonald sends her long, "unrelievedly windy" missives. "A terrible starkness and bottom-of-life direness permeated these unutterably boring letters that was like the obliterating reality of the paintings of Francis Bacon." Trying to understand how such a supposedly pathological killer can be so vapid, she finds an explanation in literature, from Philip Roth's The Counterlife: "Most people...are absolutely unoriginal, and [the novelist's:] job is to make them appear otherwise." Truman Capote and Joseph Mitchell got lucky: they found in Perry Smith and Joe Gould members "of the wonderful race of auto-fictionalizers." McGinniss, realizing he had a dud in MacDonald - a character unsuited to good nonfiction, rather than a natural Raskolnikov - and could not "prod him into being interesting," succumbed to an unjustified degree of artifice. In most journalism, Malcolm writes, "the writer ultimately tires of the subject's self-serving story, and substitutes a story of his own." As long as Malcolm is the journalist, I wouldn't complain.