Gene Weingarten, Dr. Jeffrey MacDonald, and the Indefensible Ethics of Journalism

Boy, do I love the writing of Gene Weingarten, his boldness and subtlety and truth-telling, his subjects, his hyper-critical eye and his kindness, all of it works for me. A brilliant example: this December 5 piece from the Washington Post, on convicted family killer Jeffrey MacDonald, whose case every long-form journalist is well familiar with, because of the ethical snares writers Joe McGinniss and Janet Malcolm found themselves traversing, ducking, becoming impaled on, in their books respective books, Fatal Vision and The Journalist and the Murderer. The issues--of what you share with your subjects, of how you gain their trust and whether you deserve it, of how far you can and should push and who you're helping, who you're hurting--can never be empirically answered. You decide boundaries on the fly, you make the phone call that is going to make the person on the other end cry. Sometimes, they surprise you. Sometimes, they stonewall, only to come back two years last and say, "I'm ready to talk now." Tell yourself, people need to tell their stories, that this is what you're here for, that you try, on your best days, to be of service, or, in the words of a friend, "to add to the well of Truth we all drink from." Trust me, there is no time to get cocky about this, because you will certainly spend years of your life getting it quasi- or very wrong before you get it right, if you ever do. Weingarten does.

Comments

[Stu Harris]

I'm reading 'Sharp Objects' by Gillian Flynn. A perverse little novel, actually, but since its main event is the investigation of the gruesome murders of two girls in a small town, it naturally deals with all that journalist's dilemma material.