Talk:Janet Malcolm
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[edit] Morally indefensible
Do we have a citation for this quote: "The central thesis of The Journalist and the Murderer is that, as Malcolm put it, "every journalist knows that what he does is morally indefensible." "
And did she actually call this act of McGinnis's morally indefensible? "McGinniss's "morally indefensible" act, in Malcolm's view, was to pretend that he believed MacDonald was innocent, even after he became convinced of his guilt ..." SlimVirgin (talk) 20:44, September 6, 2005 (UTC)
[edit] Quotation from Masson's Website
Masson was the subject of a two-part profile in The New Yorker (December 5, 12, 1983) by Janet Malcolm, later published in book form: In the Freud Archives (New York: Knopf, 1984), which were the subject of a libel suit filed by Masson. After decisions by the United States Supreme Court and the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, favorable to Masson, a trial against Malcolm and the New Yorker was held in 1993 in federal court in San Francisco. Masson won the trial, but the jury deadlocked on damages. A new trial, without the New Yorker, was held in San Francisco in September, 1994. Masson lost.
- http://www.jeffreymasson.com/cv.html (go to section Popular Articles)
The quotation is from page 3, which as it turns out is the first page of text and the first paragraph of "The Journalist and the Murderer," Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1990. It is most often quoted at a slightly longer length, as here:
"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."
There is of course no concordance to Janet Malcolm's work, so it is difficult to say with certainty, without doing a close reading, whether or not she said that McGinniss had committed morally indefensible acts. You could say that the paragraph above answers the question -- he's a journalist and therefore.... And by transposing this to the broadest readership, she accused every journalist, which no doubt caused the nasty reaction by many journalists to what she had written. On the other hand, to doubt Janet Malcolm’s fairness of treatment of any subject is probably not possible by anyone who has read her books, and it should be noted that in 1998 "The Journalist and the Murderer" was chosen as one of the twetieth century’s 100 best non-fiction books in English, by members of the board of the Modern Library, a division of Random House.
In the June 21, 2001, issue of The New York Review of books, she published, “Justice to J. D. Sallinger,” in which she looks at the dismissive stance that many well-know critics have taken toward Sallinger, a writer that she greatly admires. It is available free on the web. In addition, she has published a number of reviews of photography books in The New York Review.
It should also be posted, perhaps, that Janet Malcolm has been publishing pieces in The New Yorker magazine in recent years on the lives of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas. A “Contributors” note to one of these pieces (Life and Letters: “Strangers in Paradise,” by Janet Malcolm, The New Yorker magazine, November 13, 2006, pp 54-61.) reports that a show of her collages is on view at Lori Bookstein Fine Art, in New York. Janet Malcolm’s sister is Marie Winn, well-known for her book about the hawks in Central Park, “Red-Tails in Love,” Pantheon, 1998. 74.32.45.50 20:01, 14 November 2006 (UTC) leov@frontiernet.net
