The Journalist and the Murderer
Opens with one of the great opening sentences: "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." An essay about the ethics of journalism that uses a specific case to argue a universal point.
Critics say Malcolm does almost no digging of her own into the murder or the physical evidence: one reader puts it bluntly, “she simply did not do her job, she was lazy.” The structure draws the same complaint from multiple directions, readers calling it “disorganized and sloppy, impossible to read for any satisfaction,” with the actual lawsuit dispatched quickly and the rest given over to looser interview material. A Kirkus assessment lands on the same problem from the critical side, calling the book “strident in tone, overbearing in conclusion.” McGinniss's own rebuttal accused her of “omissions, distortions and outright misstatements,” and detractors note Malcolm was herself being sued over disputed quotes while writing it, a conflict some say she never fully reckons with.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
