Who Is Joe Mcginniss's Guilty?

The subject is polarizing, the author Joe McGinniss was hired by Jeffrey MacDonald to pen a book that would paint a different portrait from the one that already had tarnished his reputation, being accused of murdering his pregnant wife and his two little daughters. There are several discrepancies in the case, some claim MacDonald to be guilty, while others claim he is innocent. McGinniss was best known for having written a book in 1968, known as, The Selling of the President, in which he exposes the techniques that made Nixon appear less terrible on television. For such book, he was never asked what was the subject he was going to write on Nixon nor did McGinniss ever mentioned, until the book’s day of publication. In a way, Nixon and his people …show more content…
The perfect paradigm of such scenario is MacDonald-McGinniss’s case, in which McGinniss had initially agreed to write a book about MacDonald’s conviction. MacDonald wanted kill two birds with one stone with this book. He wanted the book to somehow exonerate him from the charges for which he was found guilty of and to share a part of the earnings of the book as a way for MacDonald to fund his legal battle. That was the initial plan, however, the result of this negotiation ended being a book, called, Fatal Vision, which turned out to be the utter opposite of what MacDonald and McGinniss had agreed at the beginning. McGinniss maintained a four-year friendship with MacDonald of letters, visits and comradeship, making believe MacDonald that he believed in his innocence only for the sake of book: “Total strangers can recognize within five minutes that you did not received a fair trial” (34). I will argue that it was unethical from McGinniss, as a journalist, to pretend to think of MacDonald’s innocence in service of the book and that aside from deception, he neglected other crucial journalistic codes that questions his integrity and …show more content…
A similar thing had to say Bob Keller, who covered MacDonald’s case for Newsday since its inception, he said that he covered the story for so long and MacDonald never figured out whether Keller thought of him as guilty or not: “He never asked me what I thought, and I never told him what I thought, because in my view that’s the way a journalist ought to behave to people volunteering your feelings” (94-5). A journalist must remain neutral to the story and to his/her subject(s), he added that he did not understood what McGinniss did with those four years of research and writing the book: “If you are going to be a reporter, you have to practice the craft. You have to go out and talk to people. You have to track things down” (97). In the book, McGinniss’s sole purpose is to create a villain out of MacDonald, he bothered little to interview people close to him that could provide a positive perspective of him or seek for evidence that demonstrated the contrary, McGinniss decided to be biased. Part of the reason why McGinniss acted in an unethical way was that he revealed his opinions to his subject, he told MacDonald “It’s a hell of a thing—spend the summer making a new friend and then the bastards come along and