SOURCE: Rieff, David. “Hoisting Another by Her Own Petard.” Los Angeles Times Book Review 109, no. 98 (11 March 1990): 4.

In the following review of The Journalist and the Murderer, Rieff investigates Malcolm's theories regarding the role of journalists and the ideas of exploitation, integrity, and artistic merit.

Some years ago, Joan Didion ended one of her most famous essays—a piece that all her admirers remember, and, fortunately, that few of her subjects subsequently took to heart—with this gaunt, defiant coda: “Writers,” she warned, “are always selling somebody out.”

At times, Janet Malcolm's brilliant and discomfiting new book, The Journalist and the Murderer, is an attempt to graft flesh onto the bones of that remark. Her formulation is, if anything, even more stark than Didion's. “Every journalist,” she writes, “who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does...