The Journalist And The Murderer, By Joe Mcginniss

All journalists have to be subjective, but what discerns a good journalist from a bad journalist is whether the subjectivity is based off of truthful facts. This is best seen in Janet Malcolm’s essay “The Journalist and the Murderer”, where Joe McGinniss acts in an fallacious manner by writing his subject without any regard to the subject’s desires. He disregards truth by manipulating facts to benefit his personal image of his subject. The nature of his story also allows McGinniss to disregard objectivity and to justify his behavior. In comparison, Janet Malcolm favors one side of the story to the other but reports on the case in a truthful manner.

Joe McGinniss was a journalist who started his career with his book The Selling of the President,

1968, which analyzed Nixon’s election campaign and how they catered Nixon to the American audience. During this, he had to keep his political affiliation a secret to pursue his story. He states that he
“hardly felt the obligation to say… ‘Gentlemen, I must again remind you that I’m a registered Democrat who plans to vote against Mr. Nixon and that I think what you’re doing … is sinister and malevolent, and that I intend to portray you in terms that you are not going to find flattering…’” (Malcolm, 1989, p. 40).
His inability to reveal his intentions to his subjects is the driving force behind his disregard for the journalistic axioms, and acts as a foreshadow for McGinniss’s eventual manipulation of his future subject, Jeffrey MacDonald. MacDonald, a man accused of murdering his wife and children, requested Joe McGinniss to write a book about the trial, in the hope that the money raised would aid the defense team. MacDonald also had the hope that McGinnis would be a fresh perspective on the case and portray MacDonald as innocent and undeserving of his charges. McGinnis took the offer, but as the case continued he started to become more convinced of MacDonald’s guilt. McGinniss eventually released Fatal Vision, which heavily implied MacDonald’s guilt, and MacDonald sued McGinnis for libel charges.
Looking at McGinniss’s actions through a lens of truth yields a hypocritical nature within McGinniss. Kovach and Rosenstiel in their book The Elements of Journalism argue that ”Journalism’s first obligation is to the truth” (Kovach and Rosenstiel, 2014, p. 49), and their reasoning for holding truth to a high esteem is that fairness and equality are too subjective. McGinniss claims that his "only obligation from the beginning was the truth" (Malcolm, 1989, p. 50), but despite this, he took aspects of MacDonald and amplified them to make a better story. He attributes MacDonald's murders to a diet pill which he was taking at the time, which causes psychosis when ingested in large amounts. Malcolm states that McGinnis "interpreted '3-5 capsules' to mean three to five capsules a day" and believes McGinnis thought MacDonald "killed his wife and daughters in a fit of rage towards the female sex - a rage that he had been repressing since early childhood and that the drug... finally permitted him to vent" (Malcolm, 1989, p. 50). One cannot say that McGinnis was obligated to serve any truth, as if he really wanted to serve the truth, he would not have regarded MacDonald as an inhuman character.
One reason for his abuse of truth is related to the journalist’s apathy towards the subject. Malcolm, McGinnis, and even people on MacDonald’s own defense team had trouble writing MacDonald as a subject. One reason is simply because the journalist tires of the subject’s attempts to be interesting: “The subject is Scheherazade. He lives in fear of being found uninteresting, and many of the strange things that subjects say to writers… they say out of their desperate need to keep the writer’s attention riveted” (Malcolm, 1989, p. 47) As a result of this exasperation, personal opinions began to seep into journalist’s vision of the subject, and muddy the subject’s authenticity.
Another reason for the misuse of truth is displeasure due to the murkiness of the case.

Despite all the evidence being present, the only way one can prove MacDonald’s innocence is to show the possibility of MacDonald’s involvement. It did not have to care about whether MacDonald was mentally inclined to murder, as “the prosecution did not have to show that MacDonald was the kind of person who could have committed the crimes - it had only to show that he had indeed committed them…” (Malcolm, 1989, p. 54). McGinniss wanted an easy explanation, and used this lack of a motive for the murders to craft his explanation into something that made sense to him, and in the process alienated

MacDonald.
If one looks at McGinniss’s actions through the lens of objectivity, we can see that McGinniss also abused objectivity as a cornerstone of journalism to further his agenda.

Michael Schudson defines objectivity as “the belief that one can and should separate facts from values”, and subsequently defines facts and values as “assertions about the world open to independent validation” and “an individual’s conscious or unconscious for what the world should be” (Schudson, 1978, p. 5), respectively. The main problem with objectivity in regards to McGinnis’s reporting is that there was no way for him to remain impartial. McGinnis could try his best to remain neutral but he would still be adding biases in one way or another. Using Schudson’s criticisms of objectivity, we note that there are three ways objectivity can be subverted: through the format of the story, through the information gathering process, and through the content. The content by itself is a case of us vs. them mentality: either MacDonald is innocent, or MacDonald is guilty. To choose a third and objective option would be oxymoronic, as a guilty innocent person does not exist in the eyes of the law. He could interview and use subjects who see MacDonald as guilty, or use subjects who see MacDonald as innocent, but balancing the two remains difficult. No matter how impartial McGinnis could be, his personal biases would still show through his writing style or his retelling of events, and would show that he prefers one

side to the other. There is no compromising in regards to MacDonald's guilt or innocence. In order for McGinniss to have written Fatal Vision he would have had to tell all of the facts of the case and leave his values on the side, but that does not make a good story, and due to the for vs against nature of his case, it would have been impossible for him to be objective without eventually succumbing to a side.
McGinniss is a bad journalist because of his blatant disregard for separating facts from values as well as his willingness to distort the truth to further his image. Contrarily, Malcolm favors the truth but occasionally injects values into her facts. She paints those that help/work for McGinniss as well as McGinniss himself as concerned about money and status. An example of this is McGinniss’s lawyer Kornstein, who acts antagonistically towards Malcolm. He acts dismissive of her and repeats the chorus of “I’m sorry, I can’t answer you” (Malcolm, 1969, p. 69) several times throughout their interaction. Before she leaves, he also asks her if she “[knows] anything about [him]” (Malcolm, 1989, p. 70) in an attempt to assert importance and authority. Malcolm similarly regards McGinniss as disingenuous: “When, two days later, he called to cancel our future interviews and to say ‘I want to put all this behind me,’ I was not surprised, and rather relieved: I had begun to sense that McGinniss’s confession to me was not a new one” (Malcolm, 1989, pg 40). Both McGinniss and Korstein had a weird sort of distance to the case and did not want any more involvement, which consequently led to their portrayal as such in writing.
In contrast, she thinks of MacDonald and his lawyer, Bostwick in nicer terms, although she does concede that MacDonald “talked rapidly and relentlessly, like an executive or a politician with a prepared line of patter always at the ready” (Malcolm, 1989, p. 49). Malcolm has a sort of pity for MacDonald and believes that set himself up by putting blind faith in McGinniss: “…he was his own worst enemy when he made McGinniss part of the defense team and gave him everything, just sort of hoping… that McGinniss would do the right thing” (Malcolm, 1989, p. 49). She initally assumes Bostwick to be a “salt-of-the-earth type” (Malcolm, 1989, p. 72) and unlike Korstein, she was welcomed to talk with him. Compared to McGinniss and Korstein, Malcolm generally treats MacDonald and Bostwick in a more favorable light, with less scrutiny for their actions. Looking at the two sides we see that more words were said from the defense than from the prosecution, and this rapport led to better treatment.
Malcolm eventually concludes that any writer has to “do [their] work in a kind of deliberately induced state of moral anarchy” (Malcolm, 1989, p. 82), which helps to explain McGinniss’s differing opinions during the trial and after the trial, as well as her own personal values in her own work. She does not blatantly alter the truth to benefit one side like McGinniss, but she still performs her role as journalist with a subjective look on the case. One can argue that her favoritism is merely because the defense was more willing to talk than the prosecution. Malcolm tried to be equal to both sides and give both sides the opportunity to speak for themselves, but one side was more willing than the other. She tried to be objective, but the subjects failed to allow that, and as a result some unintentional slanting towards one side occurred.
Both Malcolm and McGinniss were subjective in their handling of the case, but what made McGinniss unforgivable was his distortion of the truth to fit his beliefs of the case. In his victim’s words, “He was crafting facts to fit an opinion. He wasn’t crafting his opinion to fit the facts.” (Malcolm, 1989, p. 77)