Maddow and Malcolm

Talk show host and commentator Rachel Maddow. All of the am 1090 Progressive Talk (am1090seattle.com) hosts (from Air America and Nova M Radio) held a 3 hour town meeting in Seattle. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

From Vanity Fair:

Janet Malcolm’s most famous (notorious?) work involved journalist Joe McGinniss, the author of Fatal Vision, his account of Dr. Jeffrey MacDonald, convicted of killing his wife and daughters. There will be no sense of trust betrayed in a very solid Rachel Maddow profile in The New Yorker.

It’s inescapably engaging and offers a sense of a self-constructed high-wire that Maddow labors on with great intellectual honesty each evening via a long opening monologue that makes Sean Hannity’s opening a virtual tweet. Maddow is refreshingly candid about the perils of it all, as well as her own personal demons, such as depression. She’s reached the point where celebrity, and her likely encirclement by admirers and sycophants, can bring a distinct homogeneity to interview responses and a self-indulgence to one’s work. But even if you’re not a fan, take a look and you might be won over.

BongReads: Janet Malcolm Editon

There is not a writer out there who's better at producing work that simultaneously elucidates its subject and interrogates its own form than Janet Malcolm, the reporter and critic who writes primarily for The New Yorker and happens to be my favorite writer in the universe.

Malcolm literally wrote the book on journalism — The Journalist and the Murderer, which since its 1990 release, has become a staple of Journalism 101 syllabi — by slyly scoffing at its conventions, breaking the rules so that she may point out the artificiality of the form. Her prose is acerbic, able to cut her subjects (often overeducated egotistical man-babies who more than probably deserve whatever snark's coming to them) down to size in half a line. She inserts herself into her stories, discussing her processes and impressions in a way that makes each piece about its own construction as much as it's about the actual subject. And, unlike many of the journalists who take her to task for her contradictions, she's uninterested in befriending her subjects, instead using their foibles to point out the weaknesses and outright failures of the institutions that her subjects represent. All of this is to say that she's everything a journalist ought to strive to be — honest, discursive, fearless, and fair in her own unique ways.

So without further adieu, here's a selection of my favorite pieces Janet Malcolm has written for The New Yorker. They are all long, and together they will break your brain.

Rachel Maddow: Trump's TV Nemesis (2017)

To paraphrase Biggie, Malcolm dropped unexpectedly like bird shit on Monday with a new piece in tow, a profile of Rachel Maddow which on its surface seems to fawn over the MSNBC star but that, when we peel back a layer or two, becomes something much more complicated. As Malcolm sees it, Maddow is less a commentator and more of a rhetorical magician. By unsuccessfully mimicking Maddow's methods in an unexpected left turn towards the piece's conclusion, she both exposes her trick as something specious and only tangentially tied to the truth while praising the skill required to pull it off.


Somebody not so happy:

"Her performance and those of the actors in the commercials merge into one delicious experience of TV."

Dearest darlings, it's delicious! Delicious all the way down! 

Be honest just this once! Doesn't that sound exactly like the type of experience we liberals have mocked, for many decades, as the quintessentially dumbnified "Amerikan" TV experience? Doesn't it seem that something is odd, off, peculiar, wrong when we find this peculiar experience lauded in our brainiest high-end magazine?

We aren't quite finished with our account of what our best writer said in that third paragraph. In that third paragraph, she makes statements about the Maddow Show which echo the things we ourselves have long said—but she's praising the show as she makes these remarks, while we have long offered these assessments as condemnations....

The Canister Apology

Excerpts from Village Voice Article on 2nd Malcolm-Masson Trial

Sigmund Freud, founder of psychoanalysis, smoking cigar. Español: Sigmund Freud, fundador del psicoanálisis, fumando. Česky: Zakladatel psychoanalýzy Sigmund Freud kouří doutník. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Malcolm lost the first trial badly, and it was only the jury's inability to agree on the damages Masson had suffered-their proposed awards spanned from $1 to several million-that forced a
mistrial. In answering a detailed questionnaire, the jury found that all five quotes were false, and that two of them fulfilled the additional requirements needed to find that Masson had been
libeled (those requirements being that the quotes defamed him and were published with "reckless disregard for the truth"). Malcolm was shocked by the outcome, since going to the trial she had the confidence (some would say arrogance) to believe that her journalistic
methods and general credibility were beyond question. After all, she wrote for The New Yorker-the citadel of American journalism, whose reputation for factual accuracy was virtually unassailable. Much to her surprise, she found that the jury was extremely skeptical about many aspects of her defense: they doubted the accuracy of the four typed pages, on which three of the five disputed quotes appeared; they believed that the quotes had been
deliberately altered; and, in the end, they couldn't come up with a reason why Masson would have said the damaging things he had denied saying.

                                                                            ***

Borrowing a strategy from Bostwick's own playbook, Masson used the theme of "a friend
betrayed" to press his case. In Jeffrey MacDonald's suit against Joe McGinniss, Bostwick had
made a lot of the fact of McGinniss's blatant dishonesty in pretending to be MacDonald's friend
long after he believed he was a crazed killer. Now it was Masson's turn to play the role of
betrayed intimate, as he complained that he had never expected Malcolm actually to use much
of the unflattering personal information he had shared with her. Although a huge portion of
their interviews centered on his sex life, Masson claimed he had believed Malcolm's article
would confine itself to his scholarly work, and that his personal revelations had been little
more than friendly, off-the-record chitchat. He was shocked, shocked, that she went ahead
and printed them.

                                                                           ***

Examining the three massive, unedited volumes of transcripts made from the taped
interviews, it seems obvious that their relationship was fated to end tragically. Their
expectations were tremendous: In Masson, Malcolm thought she had found the perfect,
completely uninhibited subject; in Malcolm, Masson believed he had an all-forgiving confessor.
"You are the absolute, the most open person I've ever met in my life," Malcolm gushes
gleefully of the suicidally compromising material Masson so obligingly offers. "I'm perfectly
prepared to say anything - including my sexual feelings for you," he responds. "I really feel
that I've committed myself to you," he adds.

                                                                    ***

The third, and most effective, part of  Bostwick (her lawyer's) plan required that he trick Masson into
opening up a line of inquiry Masson would just as soon have avoided. Since Masson was
complaining that Malcolm had made him look foolish by taking only the most unflattering
information from their interviews, Bostwick wanted to show that she had used some of the
really damaging information Masson had told her, the article could have been much, much
worse. The notion that Malcolm had actually spared Masson's feelings will come as a surprise
to anyone who has read "Trouble in the Archives," but this is precisely what Bostwick set out
to prove.

                                                                   ***

For Malcolm, whose practice of "compressing" quotes and rearranging scenes has been
questioned, The Silent Woman (her book published just before the second trial)  sometimes reads like a response to her critics. As if to reassure suspicious readers that no scenes were concocted she tells us exactly where everything happens–"on a train to Cornwall, "in the Indian restaurant," - documenting each step of her journey. In a finale of stupendous literary circularity, Malcolm concludes with a scene that shows her taking the notes she will later use to write the book. "I would want evidence that Ihad not merely conjured it up for the purposes of my plot but had seen it as well," are the book's final words.

The fact that Masson agreed to be interviewed and talked so freely fails to alleviate Malcolm's
dilemma. In her uncompromising moral universe, the moment the tape started to record, so
too began the betrayal. Her legal vindication, while significant, does nothing to resolve the
murky ethical quandary that is at the heart of all journalism. Her refusal to flinch in the face of
our moral chaos is unnerving. "The freedom to be cruel," she reminds us in The Silent Woman,
"is one of journalism's uncontested privileges."