William Fisher

NEW YORK, Jul 4 2005 (IPS) — Most people in the United States under 40 have no idea what real investigative journalism is. Those old enough to remember Watergate and Deep Throat think it started with Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward and "All the President’s Men".

For the benefit of those unfamiliar with the story, Watergate was the scandal that forced the resignation of President Richard M. Nixon, for his cover-up of a break-in to the headquarters of the opposition Democratic Party in Washington in 1972 by burglars hired by White House officials.

"Deep Throat" – only recently revealed to be the then-number two official at the Federal Bureau of Investigation – was the confidential source who fed secret information to Washington Post reporters Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward – collectively called "Woodstein" by their editor, Ben Bradlee.

"All the President’s Men" was the book Woodward and Bernstein wrote about the experience. It later became an award-winning film.

But investigative journalism didn’t start there. It has a rich and distinguished history in the U.S. going back at least a century. In those days, these writers weren’t called investigative journalists. They were known as "muckrakers".

One of the first of this breed of journalists was Upton Sinclair (1878-1968), who gained fame for a novel, "The Jungle" (1906), which exposed inhumane and unsanitary conditions in the U.S. meat packing industry and caused the public uproar that ultimately led to the passage of the Meat Inspection Act in 1906.

Starting in the late 19th century and continuing through the first generation of the 20th century, a trio of investigative journalists rose to national prominence. The trio consisted of Ray Stannard Baker, Lincoln Steffens, and Ida Tarbell.

Baker (1870-1946) wrote the book, "Following the Color Line", becoming the first prominent journalist to examine the U.S. racial divide.

Joseph Lincoln Steffens (1866-1936) specialised in investigating government corruption. Two collections of his articles were published as "The Shame of the Cities" (1904) and "The Struggle for Self-Government" (1906), and his revelations led to significant changes.

Ida Tarbell (1857-1944) investigated the Standard Oil monopoly. Following extensive interviews, her story ran in 19 parts from November 1902 to October 1904, and later became a best-selling book. Her work fueled public attacks on Standard Oil and on trusts in general, and she is credited with hastening the 1911 breakup of Standard Oil.

I.F. Stone (1907-1989) was an iconoclastic investigative journalist best known for his influential political newsletter, I.F. Stone’s Weekly, which he started in 1953. Stone campaigned against the anti-Communist witch-hunts of U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy – a demagogic legislator from Wisconsin – and exposed unreported incidents of racial discrimination.

In 1964, he was the only U.S. journalist to challenge Pres. Lyndon B. Johnson’s account of the Gulf of Tonkin incident, which was used as a pretext for the Vietnam War.

George Seldes (1890-1995), one of the most influential U.S. investigative journalists and media critics, obtained an exclusive post-World War One interview with Paul von Hindenburg, the supreme commander of the German Army.

In the interview, Hindenburg acknowledged the role that the United States played in defeating Germany. But the article was suppressed and never appeared in the American press.

Seldes believed that this suppression was tragic because it allowed the Germans to concoct the myth that Germany did not lose in battle but was betrayed at home by "the socialists, the Communists and the Jews." This became the central lie upon which Nazism was founded.

In the 1930s, Seldes wrote numerous books based on his investigative journalism – a history of the Catholic Church, "The Vatican", followed by an exposé of the global arms industry, "Iron, Blood and Profits", an account of Benito Mussolini, "Sawdust Caesar", and two books on the newspaper business, "Freedom of the Press" and "Lords of the Press". He also reported on the Spanish Civil War for the New York Post.

In 1940, Seldes published "Witch Hunt", an account of the persecution of people with left-wing political views in the United States, and "The Catholic Crisis", where he attempted to show the close relationship between the Catholic Church and fascist organizations in Europe.

In the early 1950s, Senator McCarthy accused him of being a communist. He was blacklisted but continued to write numerous other books. From 1940 to 1950, Seldes published a political newsletter, "In Fact", which became the first to publish articles on the link between cigarette smoking and cancer.

From Ray Baker to Woodstein and beyond, reporters have dug deeply into public and private malfeasance, exposed it, and triggered actions that changed the nation.

Today, many media activists believe this tradition is being strangled by cable and satellite television and their 24/7 news cycles, by shrinking news staffs at local newspapers and TV and radio stations, by the blurred line between news and entertainment, by the people’s low esteem for journalists, and by the consuming bottom-line obsession of big corporate media.

Though these factors have resulted in far fewer investigative journalists today, the breed is far from extinct. For example, Seymour Hersh of the New Yorker Magazine exposed the bloody My Lai massacre in Vietnam, in which U.S. soldiers intentionally murdered the population of an entire village. Thirty-five years later, Hersh was the first to report on the torture of detainees at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

But "muckraking" media are largely being replaced by not-for-profit organisations. These include FAIR – Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting – which provides well-documented criticism of media bias and censorship, the Institute for Public Accuracy (IPA) and the Centre for Public Integrity, which employ investigative reporters who write about malfeasance in government and the private sector, and Lobby Watch, which regularly exposes the huge influence of cash-rich special interest groups on the political process.

These and similar groups have become valuable news sources for print and broadcast organisations which are no longer prepared to invest in their own investigative resources.

Paradoxically, the world is today better equipped technologically than ever before to find and disseminate thoughtful, probing news – but far less motivated to do so. It may be that Internet bloggers – citizen journalists – will ultimately provide enough competition to drive a new era of investigative journalism.