Books of The Times; Deception and Journalism: How Far to Go for the Story

THE JOURNALIST AND THE MURDERER

By Janet Malcolm

162 pages. Knopf. $18.95.

''I have been writing long pieces of reportage for a little over a decade,'' writes Janet Malcolm in the afterword to her disputatious essay, ''The Journalist and the Murderer.'' ''Almost from the start, I was struck by the unhealthiness of the journalist-subject relationship, and every piece I wrote only deepened my consciousness of the canker that lies at the heart of the rose of journalism.''

As Ms. Malcolm goes on to confess: when the writer Joe McGinniss approached her with a ''larger-than-life example of the journalist-subject problem - a lawsuit in which a man serving a prison sentence for murder sues the writer who uneasily deceived him for four years - it dovetailed with the thinking on the subject I had been doing for many years and fired my imagination with its narrative possibilities.''

Readers who follow journalism are likely to be aware of the result: a controversial two-part New Yorker magazine article, which, along with the addition of the afterword just cited, constitutes ''The Journalist and the Murderer.''

In it, Ms. Malcolm traces Joe McGinniss's career as a reporter and detects what she sees as a disturbing tendency in his work. She detects it first in Mr. McGinniss's first book, ''The Selling of the Presidency, 1968'' (1969), where, she writes, he got permission to observe the packaging of Richard M. Nixon for television but never revealed to Mr. Nixon's people that he intended to cast what they were doing in a negative light.

She sees it developing in a later book by Mr. McGinniss called ''Heroes'' (1976), specifically citing a provocative incident in which he ingratiated himself with the writer William Styron, then stole into his kitchen early one morning and cooked a can of crab meat that he knew Mr. Styron had been saving for a special occasion.

And Ms. Malcolm sees the tendency reaching full bloom in Mr. McGinniss's ''Fatal Vision'' (1983), which is the story of the 1979 trial and conviction of Dr. Jeffrey R. MacDonald for murdering his pregnant wife and two young daughters. Ms. Malcolm illustrates her point by describing a subsequent lawsuit Dr. MacDonald filed against Mr. McGinniss.