The Journalist And The Murderer, By Joe Mcginniss

Writers of any story or essay are hypocritical in nature. Despite upholding truth and objectivity as standards, they act in a way which inhibits the authority of either axiom. This is best seen in Janet Malcolm’s essay “The Journalist and the Murderer”, where Joe McGinniss connives his subject and paints him as a narcissistic psychopath. 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. Joe McGinniss was a journalist who started 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 …show more content…
Kovach and Rosenstiel in their book The Elements of Journalism argue that ”Journalism’s first obligation is to the truth” (Kovach and Rosenstiel 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 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 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