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Ax Murders, Baby Sellers and My Aching Feet: Inventing the Art of Investigative Reporting
From: Columbia University
| By:
Andie Tucher |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
 Investigative journalism, a feature of contemporary Western life, was invented scarcely more than a century ago. In this essay, delivered at the Annual Conference of the Investigative Reporters and Editors in June 2000, Andie Tucher (right), assistant professor at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism, takes a lighthearted look at the roots of professional journalism, beginning at a time when the interview was considered a "pernicious habit." |
 xploring the nineteenth-century roots of investigative journalism in some ways reminds me of watching a 3-year-old catch sight of the cookie jar on the counter. There are two questions here. The tactical one: Is she enterprising enough to drag that chair over, climb on it and get her hand inside? And the ethical one: Is she honorable enough to ask her mother if she can actually eat one? In looking at the nineteenth century--a period that encompassed the birth and childhood of the profession of reporter--you often see similar conflicts at work, as some journalists developed the ethics unsupported by any tactics, and others--many more others--worked out the tactics untrammeled by any ethics.  |
This was the century when the interview was generally considered a revolting thing, vulgar, intrusive and usually unnecessary, a "pernicious habit," as one longtime Washington reporter called it, and a "dangerous method of communication between our public men and the people." It was the century when entire Civil War battles were accorded "eyewitness" descriptions by reporters who never got within 100 miles of the battlefield. |
It was the century when professional journals devoted to the craft of journalism published articles on the differences between faking and lying, and mused about how far you could go as a faker, which was OK, without tipping over into being a liar, which was not. It was also the century when a handbook called The Ladder of Journalism: How to Climb It, full of tips for aspiring young reporters, felt it necessary to caution them against dirty fingernails but included scarcely one word on any topic that practitioners nowadays would categorize under "ethics." |
But it was also a century that began with newspapers under the thumb of the politicians and ended with some of the papers hanging some of the politicians by the thumbs. |
For the first third or so of the century--the first decades in the life of the new nation--your basic newspaper was in effect just another political hack. Most of them were entirely funded by one or another party, they were edited by party functionaries and their main purpose was to rally the faithful and harass the opponent, often in language of truly operatic viciousness. |
Papers did carry some conventional news--mainly information about markets, shipping and international affairs--and they often spoke about the duties of the press in the lofty language of Milton or--on his good days--Thomas Jefferson. But no one expected a newspaper to actually be an independent voice, a guardian of liberties, a watchdog against corruption or oppression--all those fine sonorous phrases. And no one did reporting as we now understand the term. Who needed to when you took your dictation from the party boss? |
The journalist who usually gets the credit as the first real investigative reporter is James Gordon Bennett, who founded the New York Herald in 1835. The following year he made his name, his reputation and his fortune with what he called a fearless and independent investigation into a sensational murder involving rich men and fallen women. His Herald was a new kind of newspaper, one of America's first penny papers, a breed that overturned all the prevailing ideas about the meaning of news and the relationship between citizens and their press. |
As the first newspapers intended for a mass readership, the penny papers avoided heavy political and international news, focusing instead on items of more popular appeal--human interest stories, local affairs, crime and entertainment--and the gathering of that kind of news began to be entrusted to a new caste of energetic young men called reporters. The editors trusted their survival to the marketplace, to circulation and advertising revenue, not to their cozy relationship with a political party. And that, they said, made their papers more true, more independent, more credible, more in touch with the ordinary citizen than the political papers that were captive to the parties' interests. Sometimes they even were. |
 When in 1836 a respectable young clerk named Robinson was accused of slashing a glamorous prostitute to death and then trying to set the body on fire, all the new papers rushed to cover the story. Bennett distinguished himself from the beginning with what looked like ambitious and energetic on-the-spot reporting, using techniques of investigation and analysis that seemed brand new. |
He described to his fascinated readers how he himself had gone to the fancy house and viewed the young woman's beautiful corpse, which, he said, was "as white, as full, as polished as the purest Parian marble ... surpass[ing] in every respect the Venus de Medicis ..." He reported that he examined her possessions, her books and her jewels, and he published extracts from poems and letters he had found in her room. He shared with his readers details about the young woman's childhood and her seduction by a heartless rake--details he said he got by letter from her former employer in Maine. He asserted boldly that he had discovered the names of the powerful men who had been in the house on the night of the murder. He talked with the other prostitutes in the house, and recorded his conversation with the woman's madam--one of the first Q&A interviews ever published. |
And all that careful investigation, he said, led him to one conclusion: that there was a terrible miscarriage of justice going on, that Robinson had actually been framed by corrupt police officers in collusion with the madam, and it was his public duty as an editor to expose the wrong. Insistent, brazen, bold, he worked the story for weeks, he blew the competition out of the water, doubled his circulation and relished the satisfaction of seeing the jury acquit the young man after less than 15 minutes of deliberation. |
Now, if you read nothing but Bennett's reporting, you'd probably be convinced. But if you read the coverage in every other paper in the city, if you scrutinized the trial transcripts and looked into the backgrounds of the main players in the case, if you dug out diaries, letters and other commentaries by contemporary observers, you would be confronted with the irresistible conclusion that he made the whole thing up. He invented the letters and poems, he never got inside the house, he never talked to the madam, and most of all, it wasn't any exhaustive investigation that convinced him of Robinson's innocence--it was the handsome bribe paid by Robinson's rich boss, who knew the young man was guilty as hell. |
So Bennett was anointed the father of investigative journalism by mistake, by journalism historians who fell in love with his cheeky, bad-boy irreverence and were seduced by the perennially appealing tale of a fearless journalist who prevents a miscarriage of justice. In fact, Bennett betrayed his own rhetoric and helped commit that miscarriage with this own two hands. |
But it's also true that, in the end, while Bennett may not have invented the craft of investigative reporting, you could make a case that he did invent the idea of it. He showed reporters how to do it and the public how to read it, even if he didn't actually produce any of it himself. He argued convincingly that the role of the press was as a watchdog on behalf of the ordinary folk against the oppressions of the rich and powerful. He helped to accustom public and practitioners alike to the idea that reporting a story meant getting off your rump and poking around the scene, interviewing witnesses, questioning the authorities and questioning authority. He helped ensure that from that point on the reporter would be a fixture in American life, if often a controversial or even a despicable one. |
Other nineteenth-century landmarks of investigative reporting were similarly ambiguous. Another case that journalism historians always cite as a milestone is the New York Times' exposure of the Tweed ring. In 1870, the Times, then not a terribly big or important paper, joined with Harper's Weekly to take on the group of corrupt New York politicians led by Boss William M. Tweed. Tweed controlled virtually the entire city, the county government, the judicial system and the governor, and, through graft, robbed the city of an estimated $200 million (about $2.5 billion in today's money). |
The Times published very little hard evidence against Tweed. Even though the editors seem to have had some damaging documents in their possession, they rarely made public any of the hard facts that would have made their case convincing. Their campaign consisted instead of furious editorials, dark but vague hints of wrongdoing, and demands for the opening of city financial records. It didn't have much effect. Officials stood firm, advertisers fled, and many of the other city papers actually scolded the Times for threatening New York's prosperity. Those papers were just doing their duty as they saw it: 89 of them were on Tweed's payroll. |
It was actually a whistle-blower who got the real goods. A disgruntled rival politician got into Tweed's accounting office as a double agent, abstracted sheaves of damaging records and gave them to the Times after first shopping them around to several other papers. Eventually, after the Times began publishing them, Tweed was indicted and sentenced, though he served only one year of his 12-year term. But while the Times certainly deserves credit for its lonely and courageous moral outrage, it seems to have had absolutely no idea how to go about actually gathering or using the evidence that made the case against the Boss. In this case the Times reversed the general rule: it had the ethics before it figured out the tactics. |
Toward the end of the century, investigative exposure became something of an industry in the popular press, its tactics proving to be nearly foolproof circulation builders. The most famous practitioner was probably Nellie Bly, the intrepid girl reporter of the New York World, who seized the nation's attention in 1889 with her breathless jaunt around the world in just 72 days and six hours, shaving nearly eight days off Phileas Fogg's feat as chronicled in the novel by Jules Verne. |
But that was her least characteristic stunt for the World, the paper Joseph Pulitzer had bought in 1883 from the railroad mogul Jay Gould and made into a roaring success with tactics his admirers called the "new journalism" and his critics dismissed as the "yellow press." Like the penny press 50 years earlier, the World sought a mass readership among working- and middle-class city dwellers, and like the penny press it emphasized crime, entertainment and scandal, this time adding comics, sports and Sunday sections to the mix. |
It also added the crusade. It was the Gilded Age, a time of notorious yet perfectly unashamed corruption, when business was cheerfully unregulated by government and government serenely untroubled by voters. By all accounts Pulitzer was genuinely concerned with the welfare as well as the pennies of his readership, and he saw plenty to criticize--plenty to reform. His favorite tactic was the undercover exposé, and at that Nellie Bly--the young woman from Pittsburgh whose name was almost inevitably coupled with that era's favorite adjective, "plucky"--was a star. |
In her very first story for the World, written when she was about 23, she exposed the inhumane conditions at the city's hospital for the insane by posing as a homeless insane woman and having herself committed. After 10 days she was released by the paper's lawyer, who pretended to be a concerned relative, and in two front-page Sunday stories she described the terrible food, the freezing baths, the shabby clothing, the unsympathetic treatment and the "coarse, massive female attendants who expectorated tobacco juice about on the floor in a manner more skillful than charming." Her stories helped lead to a grand jury investigation and an increase in the asylum's budget. |
She went on to a string of other triumphs with a string of other disguises: as a desperate mother willing to sell her baby (she had no trouble finding takers), a factory worker, a maid applying for work at a domestic help agency, a lonely spinster cruising the matrimonial bureaus, a fallen woman looking for a home, a pickpocket sent to the women's prison. |
Posing as the wife of a patent medicine manufacturer, she found an Albany lobbyist who assured her that for a payment of $1,000 he could round up six assemblymen to kill an unfavorable bill. When the story ran in the World, in April 1888, the lobbyist was allowed to respond. He maintained he knew Bly was a blackmailer and was only trying to teach her a lesson. But he also complained to Pulitzer about her "groundless statements that affect other people in her efforts to concoct a sensational romance such as you seem to suppose that your readers relish." |
Readers did relish them, but inevitably the exposures began to wear thin. Bly herself was soon reduced to posing as a chorus girl and a scorned woman looking for a private detective. Other equally plucky girl reporters were soon fanning out to investigate other horrid abuses; one, who pretended to be a salesgirl at the glove counter of a big department store, turned in a scathing exposé of how much her feet hurt at the end of the day. Their focus fell more and more on the daring of the girls, the gullibility of their dupes, the boost to the circulation, and less and less on actual reform; they increasingly deserved the term usually applied to them, the "stunt." |
Few journalists in the 1880s seemed to express much concern about the ethics of this kind of undercover work, which to modern eyes and by modern standards is highly questionable. It seemed to skate very close to entrapment and clearly enrolled the journalist as a player in the story she or he was covering. To contemporary readers, however, it all seemed more a game than a public service or even a job''a game that rewarded cleverness, enterprise and aggressiveness, and was itself rewarded with spikes in circulation. |
One reporter cheerfully confessed in the professional journal The Writer in 1889 that "I do not feel that I am doing anything disreputable if I can get into a secret meeting under false colors, and thereby obtain news not procurable in any other way," and that if a man absolutely refuses to be interviewed, then "no scruples of conscience keep me from obtaining my information through a third party, and 'faking' my interview accordingly." He even assured his nervous reader that such a course of action would not "in any manner debas[e] his manhood." |
For aggressiveness and enterprise, no one could beat the man who came to New York from San Francisco in 1895 determined to out'yellow the yellow press. William Randolph Hearst had all the ambition of his great rival Joseph Pulitzer and all the shamelessness of his predecessor James Gordon Bennett. Like Pulitzer, he spoke the language of public service, and like Bennett he never scrupled to betray it. |
In 1897 he turned the staff of his New York Journal into a "murder squad" dedicated to solving the mystery of the headless and dismembered body that was baffling the police. The paper ran grisly woodcut illustrations of the severed limbs, complete with the marks and scars, and called upon the public to help identify the victim. When a group of masseurs at a Turkish bath recognized the marks as belonging to one of their number''an easy call since, they said, they all spent most of the day without much clothing on''they went first to the Journal, then to the police. |
Journal reporters found a woman they believed was the murderer, the masseur's former lover, by tracing the oilcloth in which the body pieces were wrapped, and when the police closed in for the arrest the Journal rented her entire apartment building and set guards over it to keep other reporters from sharing their scoop. Other reporters tracked down the woman's husband, who was alleged to be her accomplice, while he was driving his bakery wagon, gave chase in a cab, and helped the police subdue and handcuff him. The headline the next day read, "NEWS THAT IS NEWS. The Journal, as Usual, ACTS While the Representatives of Ancient Journalism Sit Idly By and Wait for Something to Turn Up." "Ancient journalism" was the kind that recognizes a line, however faint, between the job of reporter and the job of law enforcement officer. |
But times were changing. By the time of Hearst's arrival in New York, reaction was already growing in some quarters against the excesses and ugliness of the yellow press. Though Hearst dismissed his critics at first, he himself voluntarily began to temper his excesses after he printed a doggerel poem that appeared to be calling for the assassination of the milksop president McKinley, who, much too soon thereafter, was indeed shot to death by the anarchist Leon Czolgosz. |
Throughout the 1890s, inspired by important shifts in America's intellectual climate, a new kind of journalism was beginning to challenge the supremacy of the yellow press. This was a time when the "scientific method"--the technique of close, objective, dispassionate observation and description based on cold hard facts, not emotions or intuition--took a strong hold not just among American scientists but also among members of other vocations. Social workers, teachers, doctors, historians and journalists too began to think of themselves as "professionals," specially trained in the techniques of their craft, more qualified than ordinary citizens to carry out its particular functions and anxious to safeguard its reputation by agreeing on standards of acceptable behavior. The archetype of this new professional journalist was Adolph Ochs, a first'generation German'American who in 1896 bought the sagging New York Times and turned it into perhaps the nation's premier authority in matters of fact, its goals embodied in a godlike creed: "To Give the News Impartially, Without Fear or Favor." |
Some of the new journalists, among them Lincoln Steffens and Ida Tarbell, were sick of the widespread corruption and graft that seemed endemic in government and industry, and turned their professional skills to the investigation and exposure of wrongdoers. Works like Tarbell's History of the Standard Oil Company, Steffens's series The Shame of the Cities and David Graham Phillips's Treason of the Senate still stand as founding classics in the art of investigative reporting. |
As the twentieth century dawned, journalism was on its way to being recognized as a true profession with one simple goal: to pursue the truth. From that time forward, it would take more than clean fingernails to make a journalist. |
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