![]() ![]() Press reaction to The Journalist and the Murderer was, almost unanimously, one of nonplussed rage. MacDonald felt betrayed and sued McGinniss for breach of contract, although a hung jury acquitted him. The American journalist Joe McGinniss interviewed MacDonald many times during the course of the case, frequently assuring MacDonald of his friendship and belief in his innocence.īut when McGinniss’s bestselling book, Fatal Vision, appeared in 1983, it portrayed MacDonald as a cold-blooded murderer. Jeffrey MacDonald, a handsome US Army doctor, had been found guilty of murdering his wife and children. This, the much-quoted opening of Janet Malcolm’s best-known book, was the arresting curtain-raiser to a provocative account of the ethical issues she identified from the celebrated MacDonald-McGinniss case in the United States. ![]() “He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people’s vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse.” ![]() ![]() “Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible,” she declared in The Journalist and the Murderer (1990). Janet Malcolm, the American writer, who has died aged 86, created a literary stir when she laid bare what she considered to be the dishonest Faustian pact between biographers and their subjects. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |