L2L The Journalist and the Murderer

The Journalist and the Murderer

Janet Malcolm

Writer and journalist Janet Malcolm died last week on June 16, leaving behind articles in The New Yorker and several nonfiction books and essay collections — many of which (as Alex Clark writes in The Guardian) “touch on the ambiguity, the uncanniness and the deep psychodrama of generating words and the fragile, contingent way that those words themselves generate meaning.” One of her most controversial works, The Journalist and the Murderer, was published in 1989 but continues to offer lessons in journalistic ethics. “Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on,” Malcolm contends, “knows that what he does is morally indefensible.” This week, Leigh and P. T. examine Malcolm’s legacy and aspects of Forty-One False Starts, The Journalist and the Murderer, and The Impossible Profession.