The Journalist and the Murderer Essay & Criticism

The Journalist and the Murderer Critical Overview

'Reflections: The Journalist and the Murderer" first appeared as a two-part article in the pages of the New Yorker in 1989. The book, with its added afterword (initially published in the New York Review of Books), was published the following year. Malcolm' s article stunned the journalistic community in its portrayal of the journalist as "a kind of confidence man, preying on people's vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse." Craig Seligman, who later wrote in his article "Brilliant Careers" in Salon about the experience of reading the article for the first time, held a distinctly minority opinion:

Reading Malcolm's cool, considered, perfect prose, I knew I was in the presence of genius, and the weeklong wait for the second installment was a torment that only picking up the phone and calling friends who were going through the same thing could relieve.

But...
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