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The Journalist And The Murderer Quotes

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The Journalist And The Murderer Quotes

“It is all too natural for people who have been wronged or humiliated-- or feel they have been-- to harbor the fantasy that a writer will come along on a white steed and put everything to rights. As MacDonald v McGinniss illustrates, the writer who comes along is apt to only make things worse. What gives journalism its authenticity and vitality is the tension between the subject's blind self-absorption and the journalist's skepticism. Journalists who swallow the subject's account whole and publish it are not journalists but publicists.”

JournalismJournalistsThe Journalist And The MurdererJanet MalcolmJeffrey Macdonald
Author:Janet Malcom
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“Fortunately for readers and writers alike, human nature guarantees that willing subjects will never be in short supply. Like the young Aztec men and women selected for sacrifice, who lived in delightful ease and luxury until the appointed day when their hearts were to be carved from their chests, journalistic subjects know all too well what awaits them when the days of wine and roses-- the days of the interviews-- are over. And still they say yes when a journalist calls, and still they are astonished when they see the flash of the knife.”

JournalismJournalistsThe Journalist And The MurdererJanet Malcom
Book:The Journalist And The Murderer
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“The therapy of psychoanalysis attempts to restore to the neurotic patient the freedom to be uninteresting that he lost somewhere along the way. It proposes to undermine the novelistic structures on which he has constructed his existence, and to destroy the web of elaborate, artful patterns in which he is caught.”

PsychoanalysisPsychoanalystThe Journalist And The MurdererJanet Malcolm
Book:The Journalist And The Murderer
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“I have read a little of the material he has sent-- trial transcripts, motions, declarations, affidavits, reports... I know I cannot learn anything about MacDonald's guilt or innocence from this material. It is like looking for proof or disproof of the existence of God in a flower- it all depends on how you read the evidence.”

JournalismThe Journalist And The MurdererJanet MalcomJeffrey Macdonald
Book:The Journalist And The Murderer
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