Are Journalists Perfidious Con Artists? National Name-Calling Among Parasites

“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. He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people’s vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse.”

So wrote Janet Malcolm in the first paragraph of a two-part, 40,000-word exegesis in the New Yorker last month on journalist/author Joe McGinniss, his book, “Fatal Vision” and his subsequent legal battle with the subject of that book, Jeffrey MacDonald, the ex-Marine who was convicted of murdering his pregnant wife and their two small children in 1970.

McGinniss and MacDonald signed an agreement giving McGinniss exclusive rights to and absolute artistic control over a book on MacDonald, provided that the “essential integrity” of MacDonald’s life story was maintained; they also signed an agreement giving MacDonald a percentage of the income from the book.

McGinniss spent four years on “Fatal Vision.” He became a part of MacDonald’s defense team and for a time shared living quarters with MacDonald (and others). In the course of their collaboration, the two became friends. MacDonald insists he is innocent, and he assumed McGinniss’ book would exonerate him. When, instead, the book depicted him as a psychopathic killer, MacDonald sued McGinniss for fraud and breach of contract--a case that ended in a mistrial, followed by a private cash settlement paid to MacDonald.

Malcolm is on MacDonald’s side. She says McGinniss--and all journalists--are guilty of “perfidy . . . seduction and betrayal . . . .

“The journalist must do his work in a kind of deliberately induced state of moral anarchy,” she writes.

Journalists have leaped to defend their individual and collective integrity against Malcolm’s onslaught, but there is a glimmer of truth--albeit only a glimmer--in what Malcolm is saying.

For a journalist, The Story (or The Book) always comes first. Journalists don’t generally approach subjects altruistically, and subjects don’t usually talk to journalists altruistically. Those who submit to the process have their own agendas, and they almost invariably assume that they will persuade the journalist to see things their way. (Why else would any corporate mogul in his right mind agree to face Mike Wallace in front of a television camera?) But if the story or the book or the “60 Minutes” episode turns out unfavorably, the subject feels betrayed.

Journalists often don’t disclose their precise intention on a given story. Sometimes, journalists don’t even know what they’re after at first. But if they do know--and if they expect to find something their subjects won’t like--they usually won’t announce that. Instead, the journalist will probably try to make a person feel comfortable and secure, to gain the subject’s confidence; sources not experienced in dealing with the media may be misled by this. So, in that sense, yes, a journalist is something of a con artist, “preying” on the subject individual, as Malcolm charges.

But I’ve been a journalist for 25 years, specializing in writing about other journalists for the last 14, and most journalists I know do not deliberately lie to their subjects or behave in a “morally indefensible” fashion, as Malcolm charges--and, alas, as two prominent writers testified for McGinniss in the trial of MacDonald’s suit against him.

William F. Buckley Jr.--he of the sesquipedalian vocabulary--suddenly found himself unable, under oath, to define one small word (“lie”). But Buckley did say that “for the purpose of lubricating the discussion in order to learn more information,” he would tell his subject something he didn’t really believe. Even worse, Joseph Wambaugh tried to make a bizarre distinction between an indefensible “lie” and a defensible “untruth.” A writer’s obligation, Wambaugh argued, is to his book--which he characterized as “a baby . . . a living thing”--and he said that in pursuit of the truth, a writer should tell his subject an “untruth,” if necessary, in order to “nurture” that baby.

What Wambaugh calls an “untruth” is what some of us were taught to think of as a “white lie”--telling your wife she looks nice in her new dress when she really doesn’t (to use Wambaugh’s example). But that’s a long way from misleading a murder suspect into thinking that you believe he’s innocent.

Wambaugh now claims he was referring only to a writer’s dealings with psychopathic killers and that he would, of course, tell “only the straight, honest truth with normal people.” But the trial transcript shows he made no such distinction when he was under oath, testifying on “customs and practices in the literary community.” Indeed, I find the Wambaugh/Buckley/McGinniss reasoning sadly reminiscent of what another New Yorker writer, Alastair Reid, said five years ago when he tried to explain certain fabrications in his stories: “There is a truth that is harder to get at . . . than the truth yielded by fact.”

Buckley, Wambaugh and Reid are the journalistic equivalent of the American major in Vietnam who said, “It became necessary to destroy the town in order to save it.”

Malcolm, too, belongs in this group. “Morally indefensible” journalism seems to be her forte. In the course of her essay, she neglected to mention her own legal battles with a psychologist who sued her (unsuccessfully), charging that she fabricated quotations and counterfeited dialogue--behavior that would seem to disqualify her as journalism’s ethical arbiter.

Perhaps the two crucial points in both Malcolm’s article and MacDonald’s lawsuit against McGinniss were: 1) When did McGinniss decide MacDonald was guilty? and 2) Did McGinniss deceive MacDonald into thinking the book would exonerate him?

Malcolm is intellectually perfidious on both points.

She quotes Jeffrey M. Elliot, who is also writing a book on MacDonald, as saying that McGinniss wrote letters “assuring MacDonald--right up to publication--that the book would exonerate him.” But neither she nor MacDonald has offered any evidence that McGinniss offered such “assurances.”

Malcolm quotes McGinniss as having decided during MacDonald’s 1979 murder trial that he was guilty; then, she writes, “for almost four years--during which he corresponded with MacDonald, spoke with him on the telephone . . . and, on two occasions visited him, he successfully hid the fact that in the book under preparation he was portraying MacDonald as a psychopathic killer.”

But McGinniss said he liked MacDonald “enormously” and had great difficulty reconciling his fondness for him with his growing realization that he had committed a monstrous crime. “For a long time,” he said, “I was unable to persuade myself intellectually that he didn’t do it but unable to persuade myself emotionally that he did.”

More than 18 months before he finished writing “Fatal Vision,” McGinniss gave MacDonald’s attorney at least a strong hint that he might not be writing a book sympathetic to MacDonald: “Look,” he said, “I have a moral obligation to the truth. I don’t have a moral obligation to MacDonald.” But Malcolm doesn’t mention this exchange. Nor does she bother to quote an explanation McGinniss gave on the same page of a legal document that she does quote in another context.

“The truth is that I knew it (MacDonald’s guilt) with certainty, in my heart as well as my head, only when I finished writing the book,” McGinniss said.

I know what McGinniss means. As Flannery O’Connor has said, “I write because I don’t know what I think until I read what I write.”

To McGinniss, writing is “an act of discovery,” so while he concedes that “. . . on the basis of the evidence presented, had I been a juror, I quite likely would have voted to convict,” he says that realization was “only the beginning, not the end of my quest . . . . I had to go deeper, I had to know more, I had to try to understand.”

I don’t mean to suggest that I think McGinniss behaved honorably in his dealings with MacDonald. He didn’t (although he would argue that since MacDonald lied in proclaiming his innocence, McGinniss had no obligation to be honorable).

McGinniss may not have known in his heart that MacDonald was guilty until he finished writing his book, but he clearly had damn strong feelings about MacDonald’s guilt long before he typed the final words. And yet, while he didn’t “assure” MacDonald that the book would exonerate him, he certainly did virtually everything short of an outright lie to give MacDonald that impression.

In his letters to MacDonald, McGinniss expressed sympathy and friendship and outrage over his conviction (“Total strangers can recognize within five minutes that you did not receive a fair trial”; “How could 12 people . . . agree to believe such a horrendous proposition?”). McGinniss also beseeched MacDonald not to cooperate with other authors seeking to write a book, implying that they might not be sympathetic (“At this time to the best of anyone’s knowledge, there are no unfriendly MacDonald books on the horizon”).

McGinniss’ lawyer argued in court that his client’s letters expressing “warmth and understanding” changed within a few months after MacDonald’s conviction, as McGinniss began to vacillate in his feelings; after that, the letters became a “much more formal kind of correspondence.”

But even in his “formal” letters, McGinniss continued to share with MacDonald news of editing problems and book publication and promotion plans in an enthusiastic, we’re-in-this together spirit that MacDonald--obsessed with proving his innocence, convinced of McGinniss’ friendship and support--could only have interpreted as evidence that the book would be favorable to him.

McGinniss virtually conceded as much when he testified in court that there came a point in their relationship when “ . . . I was willing to let him continue to believe whatever he wanted to believe, so he wouldn’t try to prevent me from finishing my book . . . .”

But McGinniss did more than simply “let” MacDonald believe what he wanted to believe. He actively, disingenuously, encouraged that belief.

In July, 1982--almost three years after MacDonald’s conviction, when McGinniss had written “75% of the book”--he even provided MacDonald with an advance peek at a brief passage from the book. That passage described the judge at MacDonald’s murder trial as having acted in a way that might have prejudiced the jury against him. Why would McGinniss--who adamantly refused to allow MacDonald to see the book before publication--send him that one excerpt, if not to create the impression that the book itself was favorable to MacDonald?

Having invested so much time, McGinniss was clearly terrified that if MacDonald realized the book might not exonerate him, he would stop cooperating, thus jeopardizing both the book and the money McGinniss would make from it.

“I was making a conscious effort to keep lines of communication open” at a time when MacDonald was “pressing harder and harder to see the entire book,” McGinniss conceded when I asked about this. That one passage, McGinniss knew, would “calm him down a little bit.”

Three weeks after sending the passage about the judge, McGinniss wrote another letter to MacDonald, urging “by all means, hype the book”--a suggestion that any reasonable person would also interpret as evidence the book was favorable to him. Would someone who insisted on his own innocence knowingly “hype” a book that depicted him as a brutal murderer?

So McGinniss did prey on MacDonald’s “vanity, ignorance (and) . . . loneliness” to maintain his “trust,” in Malcolm’s words. And Malcolm does seem to have done her own work in the very sort of “deliberately induced state of moral anarchy” for which she condemns all journalists. But what McGinniss and Malcolm did was as atypical as it was wrong. A journalist is something of a parasite, dependent on sources, but most are not predators, liars or perfidious con artists.