Speak softly and carry a big rake
Journalism can make a real difference in times of socioeconomic upheaval.
The proof lies throughout the 910 pages of historian Doris Kearns Goodwin’s 2013 book “The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism,” an engrossing look back at how investigative journalists in the 1890s and 1900s educated the public about abuses in the steel, railroad and oil industries, prompting unprecedented regulation of those era-defining industries.
Goodwin’s subject material could not be more relevant today.
The beginning of the 20th century found America grappling with stark economic inequality, an American public wary of government corruption and big business, political stalemate, an outburst of technological innovation and a Republican Party that was splitting. Does that sound familiar?
These conditions brought about the Progressive Era, a period of social activism that aimed to curtail government corruption and regulate monopolies in hopes of ending economic and political inequalities across the country. The political reforms set into motion by Roosevelt, Taft and investigative journalists labeled “muckrakers” by Roosevelt resulted in women’s suffrage, the progressive income tax, direct election of senators and antitrust legislation.
Investigative reporters at McClure’s Magazine helped make all of this happen. Ida Tarbell studied the Standard Oil Company for two years and subsequently wrote a series of articles that led to antitrust regulation, while Ray Stannard Baker’s work for the magazine directly resulted in recognition of railroad industry malpractices and subsequent regulation.
The “bully pulpit,” Roosevelt’s term for the presidential office as a platform to speak out on issues, derived its power from journalists like Tarbell, Baker, Lincoln Steffens, writers who had, as Goodwin writes, “the time and resources they needed to produce extended, intensively researched articles.” These writers also benefited from a relationship of mutual trust with Roosevelt. Goodwin writes that Roosevelt gave Steffens a note to carry with him and show government officials that read, “Please tell Mr. Lincoln Steffens anything whatever about the running of the government that you know (not incompatible with the public interest) and provided only that you tell him the truth.”
“There are but a handful of times in the history of our country,” Goodwin writes in the opening paragraph of her preface, “when there occurs a transformation so remarkable that a molt seems to take place, and an altered country begins to emerge.”
America seems to be undergoing another such molt, facing many of the same challenges it did at the turn of the previous century. The field of journalism, however, is additionally dealing with very distinctly 21st-century problems.
A census by the American Society of News Editors and the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Florida International University showed last year that there were 32,900 full-time journalists at nearly 1,400 daily newspapers in the United States in 2015, a 3,800-person decrease from 36,700 in 2013 and a 22,100-person decrease from 55,000 in 2007. That’s a 40.18 percent decrease in full-time journalists in daily newspapers in an eight-year span.
“If the next three years look like the last three years, I think we’re going to look at the 50 largest metropolitan papers in the country and expect somewhere between a third to a half of them to go out of business,” said former Los Angeles Times senior vice president and deputy publisher and current USC Annenberg School of Journalism professor Nicco Mele in a discussion last month at the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University.
The internet has made it easier for citizens to spurn the notion of a paper of record in favor of online echo chambers on both the political right and left and on every other subject under the sun. This century’s revolution in information delivery has created an expectation of constant news updates, a pell-mell approach to news consumption.
Noting the public’s decreased enthusiasm in the digital age for 20,000-30,000-word McClure’s-style pieces in a 2013 interview with National Public Radio, Goodwin agreed.
“So you worry whether or not that incredibly important role of the journalist to inform the country and educate the country so the facts are at least agreed upon — depending on what remedies, we can argue about — whether that’s as easily able to be done today.”
That’s why I’m appreciative that the Herald-Standard seems to have found a receptive audience in the Mon Valley, which got a hard lesson in newspaper industry trends when the Valley Independent closed at last year’s end, and in Fayette County, where we’ve been informing and educating on the ground.
The Herald-Standard’s two-year chronicle of Julie Michaels, Connellsville mother of 6-year-old Sydney Michaels who suffers from Dravet syndrome, fighting for a medical marijuana bill that has now received bipartisan support from local legislators is a perfect example of such informing and educating, as are the Herald-Standard’s many stories on the state budget impasse’s effect on local social service agencies and school districts.
Goodwin is right that the country can only move forward when the facts are at least agreed upon. I think small newspapers, freer to avoid politicization than publications or websites with an agenda and naturally closer to its readers than metropolitan publications, have a responsibility now more than ever to continue achieving such agreement on the facts and what to do about them. After all, there’s still a lot of muck in Washington and Harrisburg that needs raking.