The Journalist And The Murderer, By Joe Mcginniss

All journalists have to be subjective, but what discerns a good journalist from a bad journalist is whether the subjectivity is based off of truthful facts. This is best seen in Janet Malcolm’s essay “The Journalist and the Murderer”, where Joe McGinniss acts in an fallacious manner by writing his subject without any regard to the subject’s desires. 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. In comparison, Janet Malcolm favors one side of the story to the other but reports on the case in a truthful manner. Joe McGinniss was a journalist who started his career with his book The Selling of the President,

Despite all the evidence being present, the only way one can prove MacDonald’s innocence is to show the possibility of MacDonald’s involvement. It did not have to care about whether MacDonald was mentally inclined to murder, as “the prosecution did not have to show that MacDonald was the kind of person who could have committed the crimes - it had only to show that he had indeed committed them…” (Malcolm, 1989, p. 54). McGinniss wanted an easy explanation, and used this lack of a motive for the murders to craft his explanation into something that made sense to him, and in the process alienated

Michael Schudson defines objectivity as “the belief that one can and should separate facts from values”, and subsequently defines facts and values as “assertions about the world open to independent validation” and “an individual’s conscious or unconscious for what the world should be” (Schudson, 1978, p. 5), respectively. The main problem with objectivity in regards to McGinnis’s reporting is that there was no way for him to remain impartial. McGinnis could try his best to remain neutral but he would still be adding biases in one way or another. Using Schudson’s criticisms of objectivity, we note that there are three ways objectivity can be subverted: through the format of the story, through the information gathering process, and through the content. The content by itself is a case of us vs. them mentality: either MacDonald is innocent, or MacDonald is guilty. To choose a third and objective option would be oxymoronic, as a guilty innocent person does not exist in the eyes of the law. He could interview and use subjects who see MacDonald as guilty, or use subjects who see MacDonald as innocent, but balancing the two remains difficult. No matter how impartial McGinnis could be, his personal biases would still show through his writing style or his retelling of events, and would show that he prefers one