Comparing 'The Journalist And The Murderer'

The ethical rules for writing about other people cannot be neatly described. Every complete statement that acts as a blueprint for journalists and sets a clear standard fails to address at least one particular situation. Every work of journalism is incredibly unique: the writer subject relationships are different, the approach, the parties involved, the context, the content. There are too many variables in each case for there to be set a standard for every piece or project. This is not to say that journalism is a lawless practice, it certainly isn’t. The ethical rules for writing about other people must be loosely defined, and a lot of responsibility must fall on the authors/journalists to act ethically. That being said, there are some general …show more content…
On page 71 of “The Journalist and the Murderer” Malcolm shares an important insight on how writers feel about who their subjects are, and who they want them to be. Malcolm tells about how Macdonald, was a genrally uninteresting person. She informs about the frustrations McGinniss had with MacDonald’s bland character, telling McGinniss “groaned whenever a new tape arrived from prison (from MacDonald), because of its contrast to the excitingly dire character of the crime for which he stood convicted: a murderer shouldn’t sound like an accountant.” In this line a critical problem with writers, and likely source of McGiniss immoral behavior, is seen. When writing about a subject the writer should not go into the project already determined the way the subject “should” sound. Realistically, it is impossible for completely assess a subject, then fairly and accurately portray him in a book or article if they writer has already determined that they want the subject to play a perfect role. The fact McGinniss was looking for MacDonald to sound like a murder suggests that …show more content…
Malcolm refers Phillip Roth’s experimental novel ‘The Counterwife” and quotes an observation of the novelist-narrator in which he says “people don’t turn themselves over to writers as full-blown literary characters… Most people (beginning with he novelist-himself, his family, just about everyone he know) are absolutely unoriginal and his job is to make them appear otherwise.” Here lies the problem. The job of a journalist should not be to transform their subject into a literary character. If so, Malcolm may have been completely right to assert that what journalists do is “morally indefensible.” When you write a journalistic piece the reader, for the most part, is taking what you say as fact. So when McGinniss claims that Macdonald is a selfish psychopath and latent homosexual, I, as the reader, assume that it is fair for you to make this assessment because you spent so much time with him, and the whole time you were fairly evaluating him and studying his personality. If Mcginiss, or any journalist, were to confess that if there subjects were not interesting enough personalities, they would manipulate or polish the character to make them more interesting, readers would approach the