I just finished rereading Janet Malcolm's disturbing 1990 book (
The Journalist and the Murder) about the fraud lawsuit filed by Jeffrey MacDonald, the Green Beret doctor who was convicted in 1979 of murdering his family, against Joe McGinnis, the wonderfully talented but ethically challenged journalist who wrote a book (
Fatal Vision) about the case.
McGinnis spent four years researching and writing
Fatal Vision, all the while assuring MacDonald, who was in prison, how much he believed his innocence, how painful it was to see him convicted and how in his heart he yearned for MacDonald's eventual exoneration.
In spite of all this, the book, when it came out, could hardly have showed MacDonald in a worse light. Despite all the time McGinnis had spent living with MacDonald during his trial, working out with him, drinking beer with him and sitting in on all the trial planning sessions (McGinnis was an official member of the MacDonald defense team),
Fatal Vision portrayed MacDonald as a soulless psychopath who killed his family without remorse.
Stunned that such a close friend could turn on him like that, MacDonald sued McGinnis for fraud. After a trial in which conservative intellectual William F. Buckley and former cop-turned-crime-writer Joseph Wambaugh both testified how it was both normal and ethical for writers to lie to their sources to keep them talking, McGinnis ended up paying $325,000 to MacDonald to settle the case.
This seemed to most people fair enough. Even though MacDonald had killed both his wife and two young daughters, most people still don't like it when a reporter egregiously lies to someone for four years, pretending to be his friend, only in the end to stab him in the back. But then Janet Malcolm, a publicity shy writer for
The New Yorker, decided to write a book about the lawsuit against McGinnis and that's where Malcom's legal problems and professional ethics turned into a big tarball.
Malcom herself was no stranger to lawsuits, having been famously sued for libel by psychoanalyst Jeffrey Masson, former director of the Freud Archives. In her defense, Malcolm wrote a postscript to the book about McGinnis arguing that doctoring quotes to make them better is actually a service to both the reader and the person quoted. "The literally true," she argues, "may actually be a falsification of a reality." People who quote what a person actually said, instead of what they meant, she believes, are guilty of the sin of "tape-recorderese." A transcript is not the finished version of what someone said but "a kind of rough draft of expression" filled with "bizarre syntax," not to mention hesitations, circumlocutions, repetitions, and contractions.
It is strange that Malcolm doesn't know that most readers know that already. As Malcolm sees it, it is the reporter's job to figure out what the subject actually meant and then to say it better and with more precision than he ever could himself. "Only the most uncharitable (or inept) journalist will hold a subject to his literal utterances and fail to perform the sort of editing and rewriting that, in life, our ear automatically and instantaneously performs."
When a writer doesn't do that, she claims, lawsuits in which literal transcripts are used to determine what a subject actually said can "degenerate . . . into farcical squabbles about the degree to which a journalist may function as a writer rather than a stenographer."
Well forgive me, Ms. Malcolm, but this sounds as if you've been hauled into court too often by people who are able to prove from the transcript of the tape recording that you've altered their words.
As for your assertion that you have a higher calling (a writer as opposed to a mere stenographer), okay fine, why not do your writing, your understanding of what a person
really meant as opposed to what they actually said, in full and glorious
paraphrase and reserve quotation marks for the times you reproduce his actual words?
I think they answer is obvious. You feel that paraphrase, even inspired paraphrase of the sort you undoubtedly do, is inferior to the quoted word. The quoted word has much more impact because the average reader, as opposed to elite writers like you, think that quotes mean "this is exactly what the guy said."
A postscript here: When Malcolm suggests that in real life our ears listen to a quote and then edit and rewrite it "automatically and instantaneously" is true enough for some people. I once was at a trial in Texas as a reporter sitting next to an attorney who was monitoring the trial (though not officially a member of the defense team). While I was scrambling to get exact quotes (as all good reporters do) the lawyer, who had an entirely different objective, sat beside me writing leisurely without stress. I later found out why. She was doing the same thing Malcolm says all of us do--summarizing the gist of the argument, not frantically trying to capture the actual words.
I don't want to demean this. It is certainly a gift but one more appropriate to a lawyer, who is properly concerned about legal arguments, than it is to a journalist, who believes that a few direct quotations showing the hesitations and contradictions in a person's speech say as much about a subject--and give a far more accurate image of him to the reader--than manufactured quotes that only the writer ever heard.
