SOURCE: Christmas, Linda. “Get the Story.” New Statesman and Society 3, no. 135 (25 January 1991): 35.

In the following review of The Journalist and the Murderer, Christmas focuses on the lengths journalists will go to get a story and comments on their perception of moral obligations.

This [The Journalist and the Murderer] is a book about betrayal: about journalists who give fake sympathy and support to interviewees in order to encourage them to talk freely, and then go back to their keyboards and put the boot in. It's also an American book, so I'd better start at the beginning. Some 20 years ago, in North Carolina, a woman and her two daughters were murdered. The husband, Jeffrey MacDonald, serving as a doctor in a Green Beret unit, was charged and then cleared by an Army tribunal. But, eight years later, the stepfather of the murdered woman succeeded in bringing the case to trial...