Reviewing the investigative reporting craft

Investigative Reporters and Editors, Inc. The IRE Journal, Sep/Oct 2003 by Weinberg, Steve

Reviewing the investigative reporting craft

For journalists smart enough to learn from other journalists, all four of the books reviewed in this issue of The IRE Journal are godsends. The investigative projects and feature stories republishcd in the first three books reviewed are masterpieces - some of which have stood the test of decades or centuries, others of which are new but arc bound to become classics.

The fourth book, about putting together memorable broadcast pieces, is how-to journalism at its best.

SHAKING THE FOUNDATIONS

Bruce Shapiro, longtime IRE member, thinks a lot about investigative journalism - while practicing it, primarily for The Nation, and while teaching it at Yale University, something he has done for a decade. Shapiro has pieced together a thick anthology of investigative pieces so that the rest of us can think about the craft profitably along with him.

He offers plenty of food for thought in his 13-page introduction, as does veteran New York City investigative reporter Pete Hamill in a six-page foreword. Shapiro opens each section with a brief essay about the journalist whose work is being reprinted.

Shapiro understands that the anthology is not comprehensive. (Knowing that for reasons of space he has excluded the favorites of various colleagues, he preemptively mentions some of the omissions by name.) The anthology might not even be representative, especially given the exclusion of television and radio journalists. Rather, Shapiro says modestly, what graces the 500-plus pages "represents one reporter's encounter with a few dozen master practitioners, their stories chosen sometimes for historical importance, sometimes for thematic resonance, sometimes simply [because] it's a gripping read." The common denominators: Each conveys "the thrill of the chase after facts" and "smoldering outrage."

Shapiro favors selections that "speak documented truth to lying power," demonstrate "methodological ferreting of undisclosed fact over ideological bombast" and are grounded in a "fierce belief" that readers can promote reform based on the journalism they consume.

The selections are divided by era - nine selections from what Shapiro calls "The Invention of Exposure, 1798-1900"; three selections from "Muckrakers and the Era of Reform, 1900-1920"; nine selections from "Factories, Fields and Fascists: Investigative Journalism's Forgotten Decades, 1920-1960"; a dozen selections from "A Force to Be Reckoned With, 1960-1990"; and three selections from "Themes for a New Century, 1990-2000." Those final three are "Death Camp Horrors," Roy Gutman's reporting for Newsday from Bosnia; "Death Row Justice Derailed," the reporting of Steve Mills and Ken Armstrong in the Chicago Tribune that led to a moratorium on state-sponsored executions of prisoners; "One World, Ready or Not," an examination of multinational corporate governance by William Greider.

Shapiro opens the anthology with Benjamin Franklin Bache, proprietor of the Philadelphia Aurora in the waning years of the eighteenth century and intense monitor of both Congress and the White House. Next is John Barber, whose "History of the Amistad Captives" appearing in 1840 demonstrated as graphically as anything published the barbaric nature of the black slave trade. The two contributors who follow, Herman Melville and Henry Adams, are best-known today as literary lions, not journalists. A wonder of Shapiro's anthology is its reminder that lots of 18th and 19th century journalists crossed publishing genres with regularity.

The New York Times staff shows up next, as Shapiro showcases 1871 stories exposing city hall corruption coalescing around William March (Boss) Tweed. Independent journalist John Swinton is next on stage, as he exposes contract-labor serfdom circa 1882 in his eponymous Swinton's Paper. Shapiro closes out the 19th century section with three journalists whose names tend to be familiar even today: Nellie Bly because of her undercover reporting; Jacob Riis because of the way he combines words and photography in the slums; and Ida B. Wells for her courageous exposes of lynching.

The three selections in the muckraker section are as necessary as they are obvious - Lincoln Steffens, Ida Tarbell and Upton Sinclair. The selections in the next section are anything but obvious - Shapiro is correct in terming that 40-year stretch the forgotten decades. The names of Drew Pearson, Carey McWilliams, George Seldes and Ralph Nader are quite likely to sound familiar, if only vaguely. The names of Vera Connolly, Lowell P. Leake, John Bartlow Martin, Marvell Cook and Stetson Kennedy are quite likely less familiar to most investigative journalists. Starting with the 1960s, the familiarity increases - Rachel Carson, I.F. Stone, Jessica Mitford, Penny Lernoux and Jonathan Kwitny seem alive, their legacies are so awesome, even though they are physically dead. On the other hand, Seymour Hersh, Bob Woodward, Carl Bernstein, Barbara Ehrenreich, Mark Dowie, Allan Nairn and Robert Scheer, among others reprinted in the section, continue to produce investigative reports that make headlines in the 21st century.