The Journalist And The Murderer

Of pleasurable reading experiences there may be none greater than that afforded by a legal document written on one’s behalf. A lawyer will argue for you as you could never argue for yourself, and, with his lawyer’s rhetoric, give you a feeling of certitude that you could never obtain for yourself from the language of everyday discourse. People who

But now, as I waited for Bostwick, the problem of writing was for me, as it had been for McGinniss in the early days of his encounter with MacDonald, like the problem of death: it did not interfere with the pleasures of the present.

She became a reporter: she went to see people, talked to them, recorded what they said, and then skilfully composed the story which reflected the knowledge she had gained. This method lay behind her book, Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession, published in 1981, in which, over several conversations with one particular analyst, she drew out the

The subject, like the patient, dominates the relationship and calls the shots. The journalist cannot create his subjects any more than the analyst can create his patients.

In our society, the journalist ranks with the philanthropist as a person who has something extremely valuable to dispense (his currency is the strangely intoxicating substance called publicity), and who is consequently treated with a deference quite out of proportion to his merits as a person. There are very few people in this country who do not re