{"product_id":"the-journalist-and-the-murderer","title":"The Journalist And The Murderer","description":"\u003cp\u003eIn two previous books  Janet Malcolm explored the hidden sides of  respectively  institutional psychoanalysis and Freudian biography. In this book  she examines the psychopathology of journalism. Using a strange and unprecedented lawsuit as her larger-than-life example -- the lawsuit of Jeffrey MacDonald  a convicted murderer  against Joe McGinniss  the author of Fatal Vision  a book about the crime -- she delves into the always uneasy  sometimes tragic relationship that exists between journalist and subject. In Malcolms view  neither journalist nor subject can avoid the moral impasse that is built into the journalistic situation. When the text first appeared  as a two-part article in The New Yorker  its thesis seemed so radical and its irony so pitiless that journalists across the country reacted as if stung.  Her book is a work of journalism as well as an essay on journalism: it at once exemplifies and dissects its subject. In her interviews with the leading and subsidiary characters in the MacDonald-McGinniss case -- the principals  their lawyers  the members of the jury  and the various persons who testified as expert witnesses at the trial -- Malcolm is always aware of herself as a player in a game that  as she points out  she cannot lose. The journalist-subject encounter has always troubled journalists  but never before has it been looked at so unflinchingly and so ruefully. Hovering over the narrative -- and always on the edge of the readers consciousness -- is the MacDonald murder case itself  which imparts to the book an atmosphere of anxiety and uncanniness. The Journalist and the Murderer derives from and reflects many of the dominant intellectual concerns of our time  and it will have a particular appeal for those who cherish the odd  the off-center  and the unsolved.  From the Trade Paperback edition.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"My Store","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":44947541196853,"sku":"ByrdShop_0394583124","price":92.68,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0627\/8139\/0901\/files\/9780394583129.jpg?v=1770017310","url":"https:\/\/atxbooks.com\/products\/the-journalist-and-the-murderer","provider":"ATX Books","version":"1.0","type":"link"}