The Journalist and the Murderer

"Every Journalist, who is not too stupid or too full of himself to know what is going on, knows that what he does is morally indefensible". 

"He is a kind of confidence man, preying on other people's vanity, ignorance or loneliness, gaining people's trust and betraying them without remorse. Like the credulous widow who wakes up one morning to find the charming young man and all her savings gone, so the consenting subject of a piece of non-fiction learns - when the book or article appears - his hard lesson. Journalists justify their temperaments. The more pompous talk about 'freedom of speech' and 'the public's right to know'; the least talented talk about Art; the seemliest murmur about earning a living." 

Malcolm goes on to compare the journalist's situation to Stanley Milgram's famous "Eichmann" psychological experiment at Yale in the sixties, on which he based his book: "Obedience to Authority". In the experiment, deception is employed to convince subjects to inflict larger and larger amounts of pain upon their human subjects. They are told that the experiment is to see how much pain the subjects can take. In reality the experiment is to see how much pain they will willingly inflict when instructed to do so by someone in authority.  The comparison is this: the journalist lies to his subject "I want to write your story", but secretly has another agenda "I want to write this story"; as Malcom puts it; 

"Milgram's findings are not the point. The point lies in the structure of the situation: the deliberately induced delusion, followed by a moment of shattering revelation. The dizzying shift of perspective by the subject when he is debriefed or 'dehoaxed' as he calls it, are comparable to the dislocation felt by the subject of the book or article when he first reads it. The subject of the piece of writing has not suffered the tension and anxiety endured by the subject of the "Eichmann experiment"  - on the contrary, he has been on a sort of 'narcissist's holiday during the period of interviews - but when the moment of peripeteia comes, he is confronted with the same mortifying spectacle of himself flunking a test of character he did not know he was taking." 

 "After his dehoaxing he tends to pick himself up and walk away from the debacle, relegating his relationship with the journalist to the rubbish heap of love affairs that ended badly and are best pushed out of consciousness. Occasionally a subject will have become so enmeshed with a journalist that he cannot let go of him and [...] the relationship is maintained through the interminable lawsuit that the subject launches to keep the writer bound to him. 

"The old game of confession, by which journalists earn their bread and subjects indulge their masochism" is the nub - the point if you like, of this post and one wonders how journalists can possibly get their subjects to open up; 

"Something happens to people when they meet a journalist... and it is exactly the opposite of what one would expect. One would think that extreme wariness and caution would be the order of the day, but in fact childish impetuosity and trust are far more common. The journalistic encounter seems to have the same regressive effect on a subject as the psychoanalytic encounter. The subject becomes a kind of child of the writer, regarding him as a permissive, all accepting, all forgiving mother, and expecting that the book will be written by her. Of course, the book is written by the strict, all-noticing, unforgiving father."