SOURCE: Symons, Julian. “Journalists on Trial.” Times Literary Supplement, no. 4582 (25 January 1991): 14.

In the following review of The Journalist and the Murderer, Symons disagrees with Malcolm's assertion that journalists must use any means available to report a story.

The background should be briefly sketched. In 1970 the wife and two young children of Jeffrey MacDonald, a physician serving with the Green Berets in North Carolina, were stabbed and bludgeoned to death. MacDonald, who had been slightly wounded and knocked unconscious according to his account by never-discovered intruders, was charged with the murders and acquitted by an Army tribunal. In 1979, however, largely through the persistence of the dead woman's stepfather, he was tried again in a criminal court, found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment.

MacDonald's guilt or innocence remains a matter of passionate argument in the United States, in large part because of the furore caused by the publication of...