The Journalist and the Murderer

by Janet Malcolm

  I HAVE been writing long pieces of reportage for a little over a decade. Almost from the start, I was struck by the unhealthiness of the journalist-subject relationship, and every piece I wrote only deepened my consciousness of the canker that lies at the heart of the rose of journalism. When Daniel Kornstein and Joe McGinniss approached me with their larger-than-life example of the journalist-subject problem—a lawsuit in which a man serving a prison sentence for murder sues the writer who uneasily deceived him for four years—it dovetailed with the thinking on the subject I had been doing for many years and fired my imagination with its narrative possibilities. The notion that my account of this case is a thinly veiled account of my own experience of being sued by a subject not only is wrong but betrays a curious naïveté about the psychology of journalists. The dominant and most deep-dyed trait of the journalist is his timorousness. Where the novelist fearlessly plunges into the water of self-exposure, the journalist stands trembling on the shore in his beach robe. Not for him the strenuous athleticism—which is the novelist’s daily task—of laying out his deepest griefs and shames before the world. The journalist confines himself to the clean, gentlemanly work of exposing the griefs and shames of others. Precisely because MacDonald’s lawsuit had no elements in common with Masson’s did I feel emboldened to write about it (and, incidentally, was I, as a defendant, able to position myself so as to view a plaintiff’s case with sympathy). MacDonald v. McGinniss was unprecedented in being concerned with a writer’s personal conduct toward his subject—no previous lawsuit had opened this messy drawer; Masson v. Malcolm was confined to a published text. That some readers were nevertheless able to think of the present book as being veiled autobiography (and thus found my text incomplete, even devious, because it did not mention the Masson lawsuit) derives, I have come to think, from a misconception about the identity of the character called “I” in a work of journalism. This character is unlike all the journalist’s other characters in that he forms the exception to the rule that nothing may be invented: the “I” character in journalism is almost pure invention. Unlike the “I” of autobiography, who is meant to be seen as a representation of the writer, the “I” of journalism is connected to the writer only in a tenuous way—the way, say, that Superman is connected to Clark Kent. The journalistic “I” is an overreliable narrator, a functionary to whom crucial tasks of narration and argument and tone have been entrusted, an ad hoc creation, like the chorus of Greek tragedy. He is an emblematic figure, an embodiment of the idea of the dispassionate observer of life. Nevertheless, readers who readily accept the idea that the narrator in a work of fiction is not the same person as the author of the book will stubbornly resist the idea of the invented “I” of journalism; and even among journalists, there are those who have trouble sorting themselves out from the Supermen of their texts. There was a moment in my conversation with the professor-journalist Jeffrey Elliot when this confusion was brought into sharp relief. Elliot told me of his outrage over an incident in Fatal Vision—one which also appeared in the film version of the book—in which MacDonald and the members of his defense team in Raleigh entertained themselves during a birthday party for Bernie Segal by throwing darts at an enlarged photograph of Brian Murtagh, an abrasive government prosecutor. McGinniss wrote:

  One by one, each member of the defense team took a turn throwing darts at the picture. Jeffrey MacDonald scored a direct hit. He cheered for himself as his attorneys and their assistants clapped and laughed. In high spirits, he seemed oblivious to the possibility that, under the circumstances, it might not have been appropriate for him to be propelling a sharp pointed object toward even the photographic representation of a human being.

  In the film version, MacDonald is shown throwing darts as Joe McGinniss looks on grimly. At McGinniss’s first deposition, Gary Bostwick asked him if he himself had thrown a dart at the party, and McGinniss replied, “I don’t recall.” At the MacDonald-McGinniss trial, Segal testified that he remembered McGinniss had thrown a dart. Elliot said indignantly to me, “How can you write a book and consult on a film where you portray yourself as standing in the corner at a birthday party watching MacDonald throw darts at the face of the prosecutor—standing there looking as if you found this repulsive—when in actuality you weren’t watching aghast but were throwing darts like the rest?” He went on, “It’s dishonest. You use that scene to make MacDonald look wicked and evil, and you’re this pure character just watching, horrified. But if you participated in the dart-throwing, then don’t write the scene. Because it’s going to come out that you participated.”

  “No it isn’t,” (the actual) I said to Elliot. “Until the MacDonald lawsuit, no one ever thought of challenging a journalist’s personal conduct the way Bostwick challenged McGinniss’s.”

  “I’m sure McGinniss didn’t think his would be either.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Well, it’s outrageous.”

  Bostwick’s delvings into the discrepancy between the character “I” of Fatal Vision and the man who wrote the book are what make the lawsuit unique and give it its subversive character. Kornstein was right to characterize it as a threat to journalism. If the journalist is going to have to start proleptically imitating the behavior of the “pure character” he will become in his text, his hands will be tied. The oxymoronic term “participant observer” was coined to describe the fieldwork of anthropologists and sociologists; and it also describes the fieldwork of journalists. Because McGinniss participated more fully and intensely in the culture of his subject than most journalists have occasion to do—how many of us live with a subject for six weeks, accompany him daily to a murder trial, form a business partnership with him, and write to him in prison for three years?—he was more vulnerable than most of us would be to the charge of duplicity on which Bostwick poised his case. But what McGinniss did egregiously, most journalists do more subtly and quietly. Colleagues have said to me, “I would never do what McGinniss did. I’m not that kind of writer. It would pain me to cause a subject distress”—as if what we write is the issue. The moral ambiguity of journalism lies not in its texts but in the relationships out of which they arise—relationships that are invariably and inescapably lopsided. The “good” characters in a piece of journalism are no less a product of the writer’s unholy power over another person than are the “bad” ones. During my friendly dealings with Gary Bostwick, I always knew I had the option of writing something about him that would cause him distress, and he knew it, too, which gave our “false friendship” a bracing kind of self-consciousness rare between writers and subjects, but which in no way altered the authoritarian structure of the relationship. He was completely at my mercy. I held all the cards. Yes, he had consented to be written about, and yes, he hoped to gain something from his encounter with me. The fact that the subject may be trying to manipulate the journalist—and none but the most otherworldly of subjects is above at least some manipulativeness—does not offset the journalist’s own sins against the libertarian spirit. “Two wrongs don’t make a right,” as the folksy Bostwick was fond of saying during the trial, quoting his mother. As it happened, Bostwick’s personal agenda and my narratival one coincided; if they hadn’t, I probably would have put what I believed to be the reader’s interests ahead of Bostwick’s susceptibilities—though not necessarily: in my time, I, too, have committed the journalistic solecism of putting a person’s feelings above a text’s necessities.

  There is an infinite variety of ways in which journalists struggle with the moral impasse that is the subject of this book. The wisest know that the best they can do—and most practitioners easily avoid the crude and gratuitous two-facedness of the MacDonald-McGinniss case—is still not good enough. The not so wise, in their accustomed manner, choose to believe there is no problem and that they have solved it.

  * Evidently not yet ready to terminate his law therapy, Masson appealed the summary judgment. In August 1989, it was upheld by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Cir
cuit in a 2–1 decision. Masson promptly filed yet another appeal—this one for reconsideration of his case by a larger panel of the Appeals Court—which is pending as I write.

  * In an article headed “Ethics, Reporters, and the New Yorker,” in the March 21, 1989, issue of The New York Times, a reporter named Albert Scardino wrote that “testimony at the trial portrayed her as fabricating quotations and manufacturing dialogue,” and that “Miss Malcolm conceded the fabrications.” Of course, there had never been any such testimony, since there had never been any trial (the suit was dismissed before trial), and, of course, I conceded no fabrications (at the imaginary trial). Some of Scardino’s confusion—and that of journalists reporting the subsequent affirming decision of the Appeals Court—doubtless derived from the rather arcane nature of summary judgment, an expedient the law provides for defendants who wish to avoid the expense of a trial. In summary judgment, the defendant must demonstrate that the plaintiff could not possibly win his case at trial. To make this demonstration fit within the confines of Rule 56(c) of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure—which stipulates that summary judgment may be granted only when “there is no genuine issue as to any material fact”—the defendant is often obliged to leave unchallenged dire accusations which, at trial, the plaintiff would have to back up with evidence. Thus, in the Masson-Malcolm suit, to comply with Rule 56(c), the defense did not challenge the plaintiff’s accusation that four pages of notes which I had submitted to the court as the source of certain quotations in my book were “fabrications.” Accordingly, the decisions of the lower court and the Appeals Court said, in effect, that even if Masson’s accusation regarding the notes were true, his case could not prevail in the face of the evidence of 1,065 undisputed pages of tape transcript. But the “even if” formula of the summary judgment was evidently not grasped by the daily press and was taken to mean “it is so.” I would like to say in the congenial shade of this footnote that I consider the accusation that I fabricated notes and invented quotations ludicrous beyond belief, that I utterly deny it, and that there is no evidence for it.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Janet Malcolm is the author of Diana and Nikon: Essays on the Aesthetic of Photography, Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession, In the Freud Archives, and numerous articles and essays in The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books. She lives in Manhattan with her husband, the photographer G. Botsford.