The Evolution of American Investigative Journalism

James L. Aucoin

• Publisher: University of Missouri
• Year: 2006
• Print ISBN: 9780826217462, 9780826216151
• eBook ISBN: 9780826264831
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: Social Sciences

Beginning with America's first newspaper, investigative reporting has provided journalism with its most significant achievements and challenging controversies. Yet it was an ill-defined practice until the 1960s when it emerged as a potent voice in newspapers and on television news programs. In The Evolution of American Investigative Journalism, James L. Aucoin provides readers with the first comprehensive history of investigative journalism, including a thorough account of the founding and achievements of Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE).

Aucoin begins by discussing in detail the tradition of investigative journalism from the colonial era through the golden age of muckraking in the 1900s, and into the 1960s. Subsequent chapters examine the genre's critical period from 1960 to 1975 and the founding of IRE by a group of journalists in the 1970s to promote investigative journalism and training methods. Through the organization's efforts, investigative journalism has evolved into a distinct practice, with defined standards and values.

Aucoin applies the social-moral development theory of Alasdair MacIntyre—who has explored the function, development, and value of social practices—to explain how IRE contributed to the evolution of American investigative journalism. Also included is a thorough account of IRE's role in the controversial Arizona Project. After Arizona Republic reporter Don Bolles (a founding member of IRE) was murdered while investigating land fraud, scores of reporters from around the country descended on the area to continue his work. The Arizona Project brought national attention and stature to the fledgling IRE and was integral to its continuing survival.

Emerging investigative reporters and editors, as well as students and scholars of journalism history, will benefit from the detailed presentation and insightful discussion provided in this book.

1

The Tradition of Exposure in American Journalism

Modern investigative journalism burst upon America’s collective consciousness in 1974 when All the President’s Men, by Washington Post reporters Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, hit the bookstore shelves. The book described their dramatic exploits digging into the corruption of Watergate. Two years later, the book served as the basis for a sensationalistic, blockbuster movie starring Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford in the lead roles. It was a heady time for U.S. journalism. In August 1974, Richard Nixon became the first American president to resign the office, driven out by a constitutional crisis that had swirled around his administration for two years. Some in the media claimed the press had brought him down, though they overstated journalism’s role in the ordeal that had gripped the nation. Nevertheless, it was true that Washington journalists—Bernstein and Woodward especially—had relentlessly dug into the story, revealing illegal payoffs, dirty tricks, death threats, and other political intrigues, the reporting of which kept public pressure on Congress and other Washington institutions to eventually drive Richard Nixon from the White House. Woodward and Bernstein’s book and the movie made exposé reporting sexy, and investigative journalists became America’s new heroes.¹

The sensation of Watergate, in fact, is often cited as the reason investigative journalism reemerged and became institutionalized in the American press during the latter half of the twentieth century. But that’s not an accurate explanation. Watergate, despite its status as a particularly myopic myth for journalists, did not cause investigative journalism to reemerge in journalism culture. Investigative journalism had resurfaced as a strong alternative to event-focused journalism nearly two decades before the Watergate crisis. By 1962 a recognizable pattern of investigative journalism had already emerged, and by the late 1960s several newspapers, including the Boston Globe, Newsday, and the Chicago Tribune, fielded permanent investigative teams and 60 Minutes, television’s preeminent investigative newsmagazine, had debuted on CBS.²

This most recent revival of investigative journalism, which began in the late 1950s, grew from a historically grounded journalistic tradition of exposure that dates to the colonial era in America and undulates through the decades, always present but at differing strengths. “Exposure in the press was soon an essential part of a process that all knew must continue for as long as there was a United States,” journalist Pete Hamill points out. “After the Civil War, the cycles were established: corruption, then exposure, then reform, followed by a slow drift back into corruption.” Understandably, the exposés of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries differ greatly from the carefully constructed, disinterested investigative reports found today in newspapers and magazines and on television news programs, for as Cardinal John Henry Newman has observed, long-lasting traditions—ideas, concepts, and skills handed down through generations—evolve over time as a practice’s standards blend with new concepts and current social circumstances. Moreover, the editors and reporters who maintained the tradition of exposure prior to the mid–twentieth century may not have been fully aware that they were creating and nurturing what would become a recognizable tradition. Edmund Burke has explained that those who nurture a tradition often do so without appreciating the larger scheme in which they are involved. Indeed, moral philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre suggests that to fully understand the progression of a social practice (such as investigative journalism), one must look at the historical development of technical skills and ways in which practitioners conceptualize the practice’s goals, standards of excellence, and internal values. In other words, to understand the emergence of a particular news form such as investigative journalism, we must look at the tradition from which it comes and the social/cultural milieu from which it emerges.³

The first exposé journalist was probably the first newspaperman in the Anglo-American colonies, Benjamin Harris, founder of Publick Occurrences Both Forreign and Domestick, the American continent’s first English-language newspaper, which debuted in Boston on September 25, 1690. An accomplished London publisher, Ben Harris arrived in Boston in 1686, driven out of England under threat of imprisonment for pamphlets and broadsides that had offended British authorities. Harris had worked in an England that staggered with political upheaval in the latter half of the seventeenth century. Civil war had replaced the monarchy of Charles I with a Puritan-led republican government, which itself was overthrown eleven years later with the return of Charles II. Even with the return to monarchy, rebellion continued, and unsatisfactory kings were overthrown in 1649 and 1688. This was the world that influenced Harris’s work, and he carried that rebelliousness with him to the Massachusetts Bay Colony, establishing the colonies’ first newspaper without obtaining government sanction. Harris planned to issue his paper monthly, or more frequently if “any Glut of Occurrences happen, oftener” and offered readers of the first issue a mixture of news, from the routine (the state of the harvest and reports of two fires, for example) to the scandalous. One of the more controversial pieces revealed that Britain’s American Indian allies, the Iroquois (“miserable savages,” he called them), had reportedly tortured French prisoners during the ongoing King William’s War. The three-page publication (the fourth page, as was the practice then, was left blank) also reported political unrest in France stemming from the French king’s sexual dalliances with his son’s wife. While not the product of Harris’s original reporting, these articles qualify as “exposés”—revealing new (to his audience) information the government did not want reported to his readers. Moreover, his reports embrace the essential qualities of investigative journalism—revelation of public wrongdoing, documentation of evidence, a challenge to established public policy, and an appeal to public opinion for reform. The reports so enraged the Massachusetts governor that he ordered Harris’s “pamphlet” suppressed.⁴

Granted, exposés did not characterize the provincial newspapers that followed Harris’s for the next sixty years or so. Published under government licensing, the newspapers that appeared during the next six decades deemphasized American news in favor of European news and experimented with educational or literary material, carefully avoiding government censure. But the audience was ripe for exposés. Those who settled America had fled from repressive governments and religious intolerance. They feared tyranny—of men and governments—and strongly believed in the fallibility of individuals and the governments they created. The scandalous reports of government injustices and corruption they read in their newspapers perfectly fit their shared worldview. They embraced John Calvin’s vision of human depravity, in which every man is “polluted with rapine and murder” and whose “works are useless.” Early Americans expected reports that revealed the failings of government, and the printers who shared their vision obliged them. One such printer was James Franklin, Ben Franklin’s older brother, who founded the New England Courant in 1721. James Franklin frequently challenged the policies of Boston’s Puritan leaders and specifically criticized their failure to stem attacks by pirates in the Atlantic Ocean. Franklin, like Benjamin Harris, drew upon the investigative tradition of the British press to guide his newspaper. He republished a defense of the exposé that first appeared as one of “Cato’s Letters,” written by British pamphleteers, that defended “the exposing . . . of publick Wickedness as it is a Duty which every Man owes to his country.” Indeed, the spirited exposés published by Harris and James Franklin planted the seed of journalism’s tradition of exposure on American soil, a seed that flourished in the mid–eighteenth century when men turned to rebellion.⁵

The decades leading up to and during the American Revolution saw rebels using most of the colonies’ thirty or so newspapers to spread dissension against the British Crown by revealing its abuses. This was a natural step, given that colonists had become avid newspaper readers. Though opinionated mixtures of fact, rumor, and exaggeration, colonial papers opposed to British rule inspired revolution by revealing corruption and abuse of power—recognizable themes among modern investigative journalists. John Peter Zenger angered authorities in 1733 for publishing scandalous stories in his New York Weekly Journal that exposed Governor Sir William Cosby’s incompetence for allowing French warships to spy on lower-bay defenses and otherwise revealed the colonial bureaucracy’s ineptitude. Later, on the eve of the revolution, Samuel Adams and his colleagues at the Boston Gazette stirred opposition to the British by reporting alleged atrocities by British soldiers stationed in Boston to quell rebellion. “By 1770,” writes historian Thomas Leonard, “the passion for exposure was at the center of Boston political life . . . The marshaling of secrets and the illumination of deception was the patriots’ work.”⁶ And colonialists read these political exposés in their newspapers, primarily through Sam Adams’s “Journal of Occurrences,” which was distributed to papers up and down the Eastern Coast. Leonard explains that colonial newspapers used the political exposé to put revolutionary ideology into language ordinary people could understand, distilling the grand notions of democratic revolution into dramatic stories of corruption and abuse of power that colonialists could readily comprehend.

The press’s tradition of exposing the secrets and scandals of government and powerful men continued after the American Revolution in the pages of the political party–controlled newspapers. When the Republic was formed, the press was given a privileged position as a check on the abuses of government, as a canvasser of “the merits and measures of public men of every description.” Press exposés of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries invariably dealt with government policies and public men, a tradition of exposure spun from press practices of the colonial era and emboldened by conceptions of a free press as envisioned by the framers of the new Republic. Consequently, as Federalists and Republicans vied for power, “the papers brimmed with charges of bribery, thievery, and treachery of every sort.” Benjamin Franklin Bache, who followed his famous grandfather Ben into the newspaper business in Philadelphia, used exposure to defeat the Federalists and garner support for the Republicans. In 1795 Bache published a financial exposé of the Federalist government in Washington that may be the earliest example of investigative reporting based on a leaked government document. Bache’s exposure of a government secret in a 1798 issue of the Aurora General Advertiser in Philadelphia galvanized the Federalists into trying to muzzle the press. Accusations of treason broiled when Bache obtained a secret, official letter seeking peace negotiations signed by Charles Maurice de Talleyrand, France’s foreign affairs minister. The newspaper published the document prominently, and then accused President George Washington of keeping it from Congress “for more than a week” to stir the winds of war. The Federalists responded with the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, which allowed the arrest of Bache and other Republican-biased editors whom the Federalists wanted to silence. Fortunately for the press, the acts, which required congressional approval to keep them in force after 1800, were allowed to die when Republican Thomas Jefferson became president. Throughout the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the party-controlled newspapers provided weekly, then daily, accounts of personal and government secrets, vilifying their political opponents with accusations and rumors couched in the language of exposés. Independent reporting had not yet developed, but editors used opinion columns to reveal real and imagined intrigue and scandals. Included were exposés of Alexander Hamilton and his political foe, Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson was the sitting president when his alleged sexual liaison with his slave, Sally Hemings, was revealed in 1802 in the pages of a Virginia newspaper edited by scandalmonger James Callender, Jefferson’s former political ally who had turned against him.⁷

Beginning in the 1830s, editors of the emerging, commercially oriented penny press—one generation past the acrimonious editors of the party press—embraced the exposure of corruption in government and other American institutions as part of their creed, while editors of abolitionist, women’s rights, and other nonmainstream papers used exposés to further their various causes. In both cases, the publications expanded the terrain of press exposure.

A combination of Jacksonian democracy and new printing technology made the penny press inevitable. With the election of Andrew Jackson in 1828, Americans had explicitly rejected the elitism of the Whigs, who distrusted the “masses,” and embraced an egalitarian ideal of the “common man” politicized by Jacksonian Democrats. Steam-run presses and great, continuous rolls of paper made daily circulations in the tens of thousands—a mass audience—possible. At the same time, urbanization created mass markets and consumerism, freeing publishers from reliance on political party subsidies to pursue the larger audience of the working classes. Advertising became the primary economic base for newspapers after 1833, encouraging editors to turn news into a commodity and to find human interest stories that could attract mass audiences. But America did not go quietly into the cities. Jacksonian democracy brought with it a romantic view of rural life and a complementary distrust of urban morality. While Americans still distrusted government, they also grew increasingly fearful of the social changes wrought by industrialization and immigration. Newspaper exposés concerned not only politics but also social conditions, and readers were provided a symbolic world in which questions of morality and justice and social power played out. Crime news dominated penny press newspapers because it was cheap to produce and replicated a social dialogue already common to readers through the popular crime pamphlets of the day. Crime news, viewed through the rhetoric of exposés, examined broader social and spiritual issues that troubled the new urban audience. “[I]t became a public exploration of some of the hardest, most critical, most eternal questions a people must face together. It was about the possibility of justice, the privileges of power, the inequities of class, the consequences of sin, and the nature of evil; it was about the need to figure out who one was and where one fit into a community riven by change.”⁸ Through exposés and the editorials that commented on them, penny press editors conceived of and protected the public good, accepting a responsibility they would hand down to future editors of investigative journalism.

During this penny press era, editors James Gordon Bennett of the New York Herald and Benjamin Day of the New York Sun further extended the tradition of exposure by employing interviews with commoners and direct observation—recently introduced reportorial techniques—to enhance the credibility and allure of their stories of exposé. News reporting was becoming a practice that went beyond polemic to include independently reported accounts. During their competitive coverage of the sensational ax murder of prostitute Ellen Jewett in 1836, the Herald and the Sun went beyond the statements of police officials to add details gathered from witness interviews, visits to the scene of the crime, and coverage of courtroom testimony during the trial of Richard P. Robinson. Day, especially, investigated the machinations that led to Robinson’s acquittal, citing meticulous detail gleaned from extensive interviews with court officials and jurors to document the manipulation of the justice system by Robinson and his attorneys. Focusing on the justice system, Day and other penny paper editors changed the standards of exposé, expanding the catalogue of possible subjects and developing detection techniques to cover crime and the courts and to promote the public good that later editors would apply to politics and social issues, changing the discourse of politics.⁹

Abolitionists, labor reformers, and women’s rights advocates adopted the exposé narrative in their special-audience papers to dramatize the abuses of slavery and the repression of women and the working class in the mid–nineteenth century. Though their papers generally adopted the polemics of eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century party papers rather than the reporting standards of the penny papers, their opinions were grounded in shocking revelations of real and perceived evils in the treatment of slaves, workers, and women. Even more than the penny papers, reform publications adopted the exposé as an instrument for promoting social change, thereby extending the reach of exposure journalism to incorporate the strategy of outraging the public so it will demand improvements.¹⁰

Distracted by coverage of battles, journalists during the Civil War produced few e...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. The Tradition of Exposure in American Journalism
• 2. The Reemergence of Investigative Journalism, 1960–1975
• 3. Defining the Practice, 1960–1975
• 4. The Founding of IRE
• 5. The Arizona Project: IRE’s Unique Contribution to American Journalism
• 6. IRE and the Mainstreaming of Investigative Journalism
• 7. A Social Practice
• Selected Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author