Literary Journalism on Trial: Masson v. New Yorker and The First Amendment


By Kathy Roberts Forde


University of Massachusetts Press


304 pages, $28.95

The Masson case was, like so many other libel cases of the last third of the last century, protracted and clouded. At its core was the question of whether Janet Malcolm, a New Yorker writer, had attributed words to an interviewee, the Freud scholar Jeffrey Masson, that falsely portrayed him as a braggart and a fool. In the wake of Malcolm’s 1983 article, Masson filed suit, denying the accuracy of quotations that had him characterizing himself as (among other things) “an intellectual gigolo.” After a considerable interval of legal wrangling, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that a false quotation could indeed be libelous. But in the final trial, in 1994, Masson lost—hence, a standoff. Kathy Roberts Forde, a professor at the University of Minnesota, leads the way with surprising clarity through the tortuous proceedings. She also describes significant dramas playing out behind Masson. First, she shows that the case inflicted another in a series of blows to the freedom of discussion guaranteed in the groundbreaking case of New York Times v. Sullivan (1964), which placed libel law under the protective wing of the First Amendment. Second, she sees the legal battle as one more symptom of the tension between traditional reporting and the freer-form modes that came to be known as the New Journalism. Malcolm, although more a conventional New Yorker writer than an innovator, was widely attacked as representative of the purported carelessness and irresponsibility of the New Journalists. Forde’s discussion of these matters is consistently engaging. And for good measure, she throws in an amusing chapter on earlier libel cases involving The New Yorker, including the magazine’s effort to deal with...

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