New Yorker Article Discussion: The Ethics of Journalism
Join us over food and drinks to discuss, The New Yorker Article, “The Journalist and the Murderer” by Janet Malcolm.
Description of Topic:
This is the first article in a two-part serialization which became a book of the same name. Malcolm Presents the real-life lawsuit of Jeffrey MacDonald, a convicted murder, against Joe McGinnis, the author of Fatal Vision. While writing the true crime book Fatal Vision, McGinnis ingratiated himself with MacDonald under the guise of supporting his innocence, only to portray him as guilty in the final publication. The resulting libel case put McGinnis’s methods on trial, sparking a gripping examination of the ethics governing the writer-subject covenant.
Excerpt:
“Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows what he does is morally indefensible. He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people’s vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse…. Journalist justify their treachery in various ways according to their temperaments. The more pompous talk about freedom of speech and “the public’s right to know”; the least talented talk about Art: the seemliest murmur about earning a living.”
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1989/03/13/the-journalist-and-the-murderer-i
PDF of article on google drive:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1LMmh04CHDlZxvpsttuMPejeY-a_g_C_N/view
