Stories that Directly Changed How We Live (and Die)

The Goldsmith Winners

Not long after her series started to run, two Missouri cops at the local station even confronted her. Hovering over her — Dillon is a small woman — they stomped and screamed and called her names. One even had his hand on his gun — part of the body language that cops use to let you know how they feel, says Mike McGraw, Dillon’s colleague at the Kansas City Star. When asked about the situation, Dillon is nonchalant, in the way that mid-Westerners can be.

“I was polite. I waited until the stomping and screaming was over, then said, ‘Thank you for your time,’” she says. “You try not to let it get personal because you know you’re doing the right thing. You’re searching for the truth.”

The truth is out there. It’s what keeps Dillon and other investigative reporters going, usually in obscurity, even in the face of aggressive body language. It’s why Dillon landed a Kennedy School Goldsmith Investigative Reporting Award last year for her series. It’s why the Shorenstein Center, which gives out the Goldsmith Award, started in the first place — to explore democracy and the media’s role in making it better.

The Peak

Muckraking. The word that Teddy Roosevelt made famous in 1906 sounds grubby, and by all accounts, it is. It involves reporters, sometimes working in teams or alone, as was the case with Karen Dillon, digging, researching, and pulling teeth, sometimes for months or even years, in an effort to expose misconduct in public life. Those who do the work rarely get rich or famous. (Name five investigative reporters off the top of your head.) It’s also not pretty (take the recent Boston Globe series on priest pedophilia in the church) and often leaves in its wake hurt people and tainted reputations. But during its century-long history, the greater good that investigative journalism is meant to accomplish has brought down crooked presidents, dishonest child labor exploiters, and shady business deals.

These days, the current state of investigative journalism is a debatable subject. However, there’s no doubt that the media’s “watchdog” role has an illustrious, gloatable past. Tracing back to the founding of the nation, most consider the turn of the last century to be the “golden age” of muckraking. A handful of reporters (the ones we can name) working for magazines like McClure’s, the Arena, and Collier’s began poking around the dark corners of America, exposing graft and corruption that were flourishing with the rise of industrialism and a growing class of nouveau riche who wielded considerable influence over government and business. It was a time, writes C. C. Regia in The Era of Muckrakers, when a “passion for change swept the country.” The muckrakers vigorously responded, “thundering their denunciations in bold face, italics, and large-sized caps.” They “threw bricks at the wealthiest and most powerful citizens of the land,” he writes. “While muckraking was at its height, there was no institution which was immune from attack.”

At the same time, advances in printing made newspapers and magazines cheaper and faster to produce, therefore readily available to the public, who were more educated than ever before in history. They ate it up. The number of publications skyrocketed, jacking up the competitive nature of the media.

Leading the pack was McClure’s magazine, the Mother Jones of its day. In 1902, the fledgling publication started by S. S. McClure as a way to inexpensively bring literature to everyone, not just the elite, began publishing Ida Tarbell’s “History of the Standard Oil Company” about the illegal monopolistic practices of Standard Oil, owned by John D. Rockefeller, the richest guy in America at the time. During a five-year stretch, Tarbell fleshed out the 18-part series by doing something previous reporters hadn’t done: she tediously sifted through boring transcripts of congressional hearings, land deeds, and court records, inventing a brand new “paper-trail school of journalism.” Prior to Tarbell, exposés were based primarily on gossip, interviewing, and undercover spy tactics.

Other hard-hitting series followed. Lincoln Steffens on political corruption at the local level. Upton Sinclair on unsanitary meatpacking conditions. David Graham Phillipps on crooked congressmen. Samuel Hopkins Adams on dangerous chemicals used in over-the-counter, unregulated medications. Ray Stannard Baker on railroad greed and the lynching of black southerners. Photography, a relatively new invention, also got serious, moving from decoration to documentation: Jacob Riis on the squalid conditions of tenement housing in New York City, Lewis Hine on the plight of child coal miners.

The Bubble Bursts

It was an intense decade. Unfortunately, the golden age of muckraking lasted just that long: a little more than 10 years. Conservative special interests began buying up muckraking magazines or starting competitors. Libel laws were toughened. A new profession — public relations — emerged, staffed mostly by former journalists ready to challenge every word. One magazine was even infiltrated with spies, who copied stockholder lists. The stockholders were told the magazine was misusing funds. Eventually, the magazine had trouble securing loans and had to be sold. It quickly folded. “The Interests set out resolutely…to bring in the fiery untamed muckraking magazine,” wrote Charles Edward Russell in 1914 in Pearson’s magazine, “and tether it in the corporation corral.”

By the time World War I rolled around, a combination of the war, a decrease in the number of publications, new ownership by large corporations, and a pullback of advertising dollars further forced investigative publications out of business or to soften their content. After the war, President Warren Harding called for a “return to normalcy.” The public, eager to get back on track with their lives, agreed. The press responded. Fewer and fewer investigative pieces were written.

After that, investigative reporting ebbed and flowed, reaching its lowest point during the patriotic decades of the 1940s and 1950s before making a comeback in the turbulent, “Let’s Question Everything” 1960s. By the early 1970s, the second “golden age” of muckraking began. Seymour Hersh published the Pulitzer Prize-winning “My Lai” series about the massacre of innocent civilians in a Vietnamese village during the Vietnam War. Paul Brodeur tackled the massive public health risk posed by asbestos. David Burnham exposed corruption in the New York City Police Department with the help of an officer named Frank Serpico, made famous years later by Al Pacino in the movie Serpico.

And then two reporters for the Washington Post turned investigative journalism upside down in 1972 with an anonymous source called Deep Throat and the first resignation of an American president.

Deep Truth

The names “Woodward and Bernstein” — almost always said in unison — have become, since then, synonymous with the investigative reporter. (Although some argue that their story was in an entirely different realm from most.) Their work certainly impacted Karen Dillon. After years working on a General Electric assembly line making refrigerator parts, she was inspired to change careers and become a reporter, in part, because of Watergate. It’s why she sleeps with a pad and pencil by her bed. She’s afraid she may forget something important.

“These projects take over your life. You’re eating and breathing the story,” she says. “It becomes your life.”

“All of Washington was changed with Watergate, especially Washington journalism,” wrote Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel in the May/June 2001 issue of Columbia Journalism Review. Soon after, the New York Times established a formal investigative team in its Washington bureau. 60 Minutes was launched. Time declared 1974 the “Year of the Muckraker ” after four Pulitzer Prizes were awarded for investigative series.

“Scarcely a reporter in the country is now immune to fantasies of heroic achievement and epic remuneration,” wrote Newsweek in 1976. “Woodstein envy is rampant, even among newsmen with enviable reputations of their own.”

Investigative reporting had become hot again. Sexy even.

From Watergate to Gunslinger

Today scores of “I-Teams” exist at local television stations across the country. Professional groups like Investigative Reporters and Editors hold conferences to debate the profession. Honors like the Kennedy School’s Goldsmith Award, which Karen Dillon won, are given annually (see sidebar).

“We seem to be in one of the peak periods now,” says Joe Bergantino MPA 1985, an investigative reporter at Boston’s WBZ-TV. As he sees it, investigative journalism is thriving at many of the major newspapers and some television stations across the country. “It’s probably no coincidence that it coincides with an economic downturn.”

Watergate clearly had a lasting effect on how and why we report. However, its legacy wasn’t all positive, say some, including the two men who helped put the scandal in the history books: Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein.

During a string of interviews in 2002 marking the 30th anniversary of the bugging of the Democratic National Committee and the Watergate break-in, Bernstein said on Meet the Press that while the lessons from Watergate are there for journalists — be meticulous, report tough but fair, base your work on facts, double-source information — “I wish that they had been followed more.”

Instead, in a rush to get the story out first in this 24-hour news cycle, many journalists aren’t careful, overuse single and anonymous sources, and are swayed by gossip and manufactured controversy. “There are too many journalists who are gunslingers,” he said.

The definition of the field has also changed in recent years, says Bergantino, and not necessarily for the better.

“Oftentimes, the word ‘investigative’ is misused. It’s sexy to say, ‘We’re investigating,’ but in fact, a lot of what’s defined as investigative reporting is just good basic reporting,” he says. “There’s been a lot of scandal reporting passed off as investigative. Some might view the Lewinsky/Clinton or Chandra Levy scandals as investigative. I don’t, and I don’t think a lot of other investigative reporters do either.”

Certainly not all investigations rise to the level of Watergate. “TV news has been the worst offender.” Bergantino says. “‘Investigations’ into the dangers of high-heel shoes or automatic doors stoop to the level of total absurdity. Viewers have caught on and laugh this stuff off the screen with a press of the clicker.”

Problematic in this evolution of “McMuck,” or muckraking-lite, as it’s sometimes called, says Richard Parker, an adjunct lecturer in public policy and senior fellow at the Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy, is that the public is starting to tune out not just the silly stories, but the serious ones as well.

“The sheer volume of that kind of ‘exposé’ means that people have become inured to it,” he says. “Enron? Big deal. Another crooked corporation.”

Parker began his journalism career in the 1960s at the progressive magazine Ramparts then went on to co-found Mother Jones magazine in 1975, in which hard-hitting exposés forced Ford to recall its deadly Pinto and pharmaceutical giant A. H. Robbins to stop selling the equally deadly Dalkon Shield IUD. Things have changed since those halcyon days, he says. Like other writers, he’s now concerned about the future of investigative reporting, particularly in light of mega-media mergers and a “bottom-line” mentality.

When Ben Bagdikian published The Media Monopoly in 1984, he reported that about 50 media conglomerates dominated the U.S. mass media.

“By today’s standards,” writes Robert McChesney in Rich Media, Poor Democracy, “that era was downright competitive.”

The number has dwindled to a handful, and ownership isn’t just horizontal (one newspaper owning a handful of other newspapers), but vertical (one newspaper owning televisions stations, movie studios, cable channels, cable systems, music companies, and magazines.)

According to a February report put out by the Media Access Project and the Center for Digital Democracy, this kind of “cross ownership” often transforms newspapers “from watchdogs into lapdogs, unable to report on or criticize affiliated TV media, particularly when the interests of the cross owners are most affected.”

Journalists worry. In a 1999 survey by the Pew Research Center, among those in television and radio, particularly national television, 53 percent of journalists compared to 38 percent of news executives said that pressure to make a profit is hurting the quality of coverage rather than just changing the way things are done. This is a reversal from the center’s poll four years earlier, when the national television media split was 37 percent journalists to 46 percent news executives.

Fear of corporate influence interfering with journalistic integrity was evident even in the early days of investigative reporting. According to Robert Miraldi in Muckraking and Objectivity, “The breakup of the original McClure’s staff came, in part, because in 1906, McClure began…to seek outside capital. The muckrakers felt that the new business interests would be hostile to their reporting.” Tarbell said in her 1939 autobiography that investigative journalism “has lost the passion for facts in a passion for subscription.”

Owners, of course, have their own opinions, primarily that mergers and corporate influence make journalism stronger. The evening news at network-financed local television stations, for instance, can be as snazzy and sharp as the Big Guys, with reporting from anywhere in the world. A small town newspaper with limited funds for expensive investigative series can be infused with cash and resources when bought by a wealthy, corporate giant. “Journalism is a business,” writes Michael Gartner, a former president of NBC News in USA Today in February. “You can’t be journalistically vigorous if you aren’t economically strong.”

“I can understand the bottom-line mentality but not respect it,” Richard Parker says, having worked both as an editor and a publisher at Mother Jones. “It depends on what you want from your magazine. You can be a bottom feeder or you can strive for excellence. If you do well, then excellence is part of the goodwill that hits the bottom line. It sustains your mission and brings in new subscribers.”

“The problem is that journalism is on the one hand hit by a lot of economic problems — the downturn in the economy — and on the other, corporate issues,” says Alex Jones, director of the Shorenstein Center and a former reporter and editor. “Investigative reporting is expensive. It’s the luxury of American journalism. It tends to get less attention when there are fewer resources. In TV especially, there’s not a lot of interest in it except in a Dateline-kind of way.”

At some stations and publications, this was evident after September 11, when money was reallocated and the mission revamped to cover Ground Zero and Osama Bin Laden.

“The story of the year has been about terrorism,” says Jones. “It’s taken some of the attention and energy away from investigative journalism.
It’s also created new stories, though, so the impact of September 11 is a mixed bag.”

Onward

No one interviewed had a crystal ball that could predict what shape investigative journalism will take in the near future, as mega mergers continue and the economy tightens. Will this second era of investigative reporting follow in the footsteps of the first and become just a brilliant but dusty chapter in journalism textbooks? If best-selling investigative books like Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation and the Boston Globe’s wide-reaching series on the crisis in the Catholic Church are any indication, the answer would be, definitely not. Although Americans in recent years have ranked reporters below lawyers and on par with insurance salespeople in the contempt they inspire, it’s clear that investigative reporting is a must in any democratic society. Because of investigative reporters, child labor laws were passed, worker compensation laws enacted, building codes created, and election laws modified. Crooked politicians were kicked out of office, military secrets revealed, and pedophiles punished (see sidebar).

It’s these successes that help reporters like Karen Dillon get support for their next project. Winning awards helps too.

“The Goldsmith Award has given my editors great faith in my news judgment. When I presented my next project after winning the prize, there were few questions asked,” she says.

Of course, her “dogged” personality is also a bonus, says Mike McGraw.

“Karen doesn’t give up or let things, little or big, deter her,” he says. “She doesn’t let a refusal to comment stop her. She always finds a way.”

Asked if he meant what he said in a Columbia Journalism Review interview last year, that Dillon reminds him of a “terrier on steroids,” McGraw laughs.

“I truly meant that. She took it as a compliment,” he says. “Investigative reporting is like a jigsaw puzzle that someone else took apart because they don’t want you to know something. Karen will look forever for that missing piece.”