The journalist and the murderer and the editor and the coward

I was a newspaper reporter, and I hated it

Even after 30 years of reading the New Yorker, I have to force myself to register the bylines. There have been plenty of well-branded writers whose names pop off the page, but dozens of others who, as much as I’ve enjoyed their work, inhabit the same cloudy pool in my mind. I have long taken nourishment from this literate, evocative soup, but I haven’t always bothered to index the ingredients. 

I regret to say that, while she was alive, Janet Malcolm fell into the latter category. Scanning a list of her articles on newyorker.com, I can’t say that I definitively remember reading any of them. Maybe I did? I dunno. It’s a shame, though, because Malcolm (who passed away two years ago this week) is a remarkable writer with a devoted following. She came (back?) onto my radar a few months ago, when I read an article about her work in the New York Review of Books that begins, “Janet Malcolm made her reputation writing about people who didn’t know when to shut up.” How could I forget about someone like that? 

The article spends a few paragraphs describing her 1990 book The Journalist and the Murderer, which initially appeared as a pair of long New Yorker articles the previous year. At its center is a lawsuit in which a convicted murderer sought damages from a journalist who wrote a book about his crime. This sounded fascinating, so I quickly tracked it down.  

What happened was that a former army doctor named Jeffrey MacDonald was accused of murdering his pregnant wife and two young daughters. He was acquitted once, but the case came back to trial a few years later. Desperate for good press, his team decided to enlist what they thought would be a sympathetic writer - a bestselling author named Joe McGinnis - to tell the story of the trial from the defense’s POV. It didn’t work out the way anyone hoped. McGinnis became convinced of MacDonald’s guilt but continued to act like an advocate and friend for years after MacDonald was locked up. The book, Fatal Vision (which was made into a TV miniseries starring a young Gary Cole as MacDonald), was a withering indictment that diagnosed MacDonald as a narcissistic psychopath. MacDonald didn’t see the book until it was published, and he was incensed at the betrayal behind his portrayal. So he sued. 

The Journalist and the Murder one of those remarkable, un-put-downable books where literally nobody comes off well. The NYRB article was right: Malcolm hands everyone the rope to tie their noose, which she then yanks taut with her merciless writing. But for all the cunning of her approach, she also kicks the chair out from under her own impunity. That’s because she believes journalism, at its heart, is a necessary but unethical profession. In order to get the story, the journalist depends upon some level of dishonesty. 

As entertaining as this book is, it’s also highly sobering in today’s environment. Trust in journalists is at an all-time low, and opinions like these run the danger of adding fuel to far-right fires. If journalists need to do whatever it takes to get to the truth, does that justify lying themselves? If they lie to a subject to gain their trust, how can we be sure they won’t lie to the public? 

To be clear, I believe in a free press and feel that, in theory if not always in practice, journalists are essential to the health of a democracy. And Malcolm’s book, despite the cynical glee with which it dissects an extreme test of journalistic integrity, is drawn up in delicate shades of gray. And yet, I can’t pretend that I don’t have a deep sense of unease with elements of the journalistic endeavor. This is probably in part because, about 25 years ago, I spent a few highly uncomfortable months working as a journalist myself. 

Okay, “journalist” is a stretch. Fresh out of college, I was a staff reporter for a chain of local newspapers in the Hudson Valley. My output was 90% covering town board meetings where absolutely nothing happened. Whenever I actually had to interview anyone, it was for softball pieces in support of modest institutional priorities, like school programs or a food drive at a local church. I got to meet and talk to dozens of nice, normal people who were generally happy to be quoted on a range of utterly noncontroversial topics. 

But the experience overall was exhausting and stressful. There were some idiosyncratic elements to this - such as the fact that Hope had the same gig but couldn’t drive, leading to breathless days spent shuttling us both back and forth between the editorial office and our far-flung assignments. But more unnerving was the way the job required me to puncture a hole, however small, into the protective shells of other people’s lives. Anytime a conversation went beyond prodding someone to rephrase a press release, I had to ask questions that implied I wasn’t taking them at face value. And that became too emotionally painful to bear. 

I tried to be game for as long as I could, but there was one non-incident that proved once and for all that I wasn’t cut out to be a reporter. It came in via fax. 

This was late 1998 or early 1999. We’d been on the job for a few months, and it was already becoming clear that it wasn’t going to work out long-term. We had answered the want ad imagining a kind of folksy glamor - as aspiring writers and artists, what better life experience could we get than penning street-level articles across a series of small towns? Fresh out of college, it was a chance to meet the Real America. But what we had envisioned as easy and exciting had quickly become a slog, and we were counting the days until we’d earn enough money to finally make our move to NYC. 

Our editor-in-chief was an older guy named Steve who was somehow more besotted by the romance of the press than we had been, despite having been in the game long enough to harden. Like a Hecht/MacArthur character, he was a trickster and a goof on the surface while cultivating serious ambitions underneath. He aspired to be a crusading muckraker, spending many hours working on a big piece about mob ties to the state government. 

The fax was sent from a small town on my beat, and Steve smacked it onto my desk with unconcealed giddiness - “I’ve got a hot one for you!” Several typewritten paragraphs described an incident in which police had arrived at the gate of a local farm to investigate… what, exactly? I’ve long since forgotten the main thrust of the report, but it purported to describe an innocent rural family being oppressed by the authorities. The police didn’t enter the property, but the narrative was presented as a standoff, studded with dramatic details. At one point, a private helicopter landed at a sprawling estate next door, which was owned by the publisher of a prominent NYC daily. The disruption spooked one of the family’s horses into rearing back and whinnying portentously. The cops left, and the recipient of the fax was instructed to call the number of a local lawyer for more info. The missive, purporting to be the work of a concerned witness, was unsigned. 

I went back to Steve and said, “Uh, what do you want me to do with this?” He was like, “Are you kidding? This is an amazing story! It’s got haves versus have-nots, unjust oppression, sticking it to the big guys…” 

We were both looking between the lines, but we were seeing completely different things. While Steve took the bait and envisioned a populist expose, I saw a very sad family hungry for attention, who sent an anonymous fax to gin up a routine municipal incident into something self-serving and sensationalistic. The helicopter owner didn’t even have anything to do with the incident beyond providing some theatrical embellishment. There was no there there. But Steve was the editor, so, with a cannonball in my gut, I went back to my desk and called the lawyer. 

Maybe if he’d offered any sort of defensiveness or legalese my opinion would have changed. But the lawyer was completely frank with me. “Look,” he said, “That fax almost definitely came from the family themselves. They do this kind of thing all the time - they get into some kind of minor trouble and then try to make it seem like everyone’s out to get them. I’ve done a little work for them here and there, but they’re not active clients right now. I’ll be honest, whatever they’re talking about, I don’t think it’s worth your time.” 

Well, these did not sound like people I wanted to get to know. The idea of tracking them down and chasing my own tail for a few weeks while they tried to manipulate me into telling their made-up story had negative appeal for me. And I told Steve as much. 

“Really,” he said. “You don’t think the lawyer’s trying to hide something?”

“Not really. If they were his clients, wouldn’t he try to speak for them? And if they’re not, what is he trying to hide?” 

“But don’t you want to talk to the family? Get their side of the story?” 

“I don’t really think there’s a story there, Steve.” 

“Hmm. Well, it’s your choice.” 

He let it go at that, but his disappointment was resounding. Hope and I left the paper a few weeks later, and I never recovered his respect. 

In retrospect, of course, maybe there was a story there. If so, it wasn’t a newspaper story - at least not for the type of podunk publications we were putting out. Maybe it was a profile of paranoid people making eccentric bids for attention and self-respect. Maybe there was the opportunity to ingratiate myself into their lives and let them spill out all their obsessions and strained accusations - as Malcolm points out, there’s no one more talkative than a self-deceiving subject. Then I could take everything they said and turn it against them in a thoughtful article indicting our society’s compulsion to drive private issues into the glaring spotlight of publicity. Sure, maybe there’d be some baked-in sympathy for their plight, but to them it would come across as condescension, or worse, treachery. Because nothing honest or productive could possibly sate their sense of grievance. And I would have dragged their pain into the open for what? To make them even more bitter? Perhaps a real reporter would have the stomach for it, but not me.

It’s interesting to think that, at that time and for many years after, my main creative focus was on theater, another pursuit that’s famous for blurring the lines between reality and lying. I’ve always been comfortable acting on the stage, but that’s because everyone agrees it’s make-believe. Weeks before starting my reporting job, I had no problem graying my temples and pretending to be an aged Renaissance-era wizard in a shoestring production of The Tempest. But putting on a persona, building an alternative truth - these are things that happen in a liminal creative space, not in our streets and homes. The kind of journalistic trickery that Malcolm describes - and confesses to - conjures the days when actors were buried at the crossroads as agents of the devil. We look down on that as a more credulous time, where people imagined secret forces converging to trap them at every turn - but perhaps it wasn’t so different from the conspiracy-addled culture we live in today. 

Even though journalism is not for me, I have great respect for Janet Malcolms of this world. It’s not a simple thing to stay ahead of the people trying to trick us. Unlike the subject of her book, the best journalists are keen enough to analyze and embrace the contradictions of their craft. They plunge into ambiguity, putting themselves into disturbing situations for our education and entertainment. Their intentions sometimes backfire, but their risks yield important results. We outsource our discomfort to them, and they come back with portraits that are really mirrors, showing us who we think we are and who we’re afraid to be. It’s as good a reason as any for paying closer attention to those bylines.