The muckrakers aren't dead ... not quite, anyway

In my Introduction to Mass Communication course I usually get around to talking a bit about the so-called "muckrakers" - the early 20th century magazine journalists who did everything they could to uncover corruption and scandal in government and Big Business. The muckrakers – they were given their name by President Theodore Roosevelt – were at their height during the progressive era of American politics, for about a decade from 1902 – when McClures magazine ran a series of investigative reports on life-insurance frauds, labor conditions, business monopolies, and political scandal in city governments. During this period there were numerous exposes, such as Ida Tarbell’s series, “History of Standard Oil” (which took on John D. Rockefeller’s oil conglomerate), and Lincoln Steffens' “Shame of the Cities,” which tackled urban problems (both of these ran in McClures). Other magazines joined in the fray, including Collier’s (with the “Great American Fraud” series, and Cosmopolitan (“The Treason of the Senate”). Even Ladies' Home Journal got into the act. The era was brought to a close by the coming of the Great War, though it might also have had something to do with big industrialists such as Rockefeller and J.P. Morgan buying up some muckraking magazines so they could shut them up.

The Muckrakers’ tradition never completely went away in the press. It morphed into investigative journalism, interpretive journalism, new journalism, etc. And the muckraking legacy can still found in magazines such as The Nation, Z, Mother Jones – and even The New Yorker, mainly in the form of Seymour Hersh (see here for his latest New Yorker piece on the Bush administration’s intentions toward Iran). Hersh last May also broke the story about administration involvement at the highest levels with the Abu Ghraib prison torture scandal.

The point is not that we should applaud today’s magazines for taking a swipe at the Republican government just because it's Republican. It’s that we should applaud the media – or any branch of the media, no matter how small and (now) insignificant – still willing to take a swipe at any and all malfeasance by Big Government and Big Business (of course, magazines as a medium just don't have the impact they had a century ago). And god knows, there’s still plenty of malfeasance to go around. It just so happens that the Republicans currently run everything, so they should be Target No. 1 - until the Democrats get back in (whenever that'll be!) But we also need in the media that progressive tone of shocked and righteous indignation about Abu Ghraib, Enron, Tyco, and so on – and that, I fear, is slowly fading, Seymour Hersh’s work notwithstanding.