Citizen Jeff

Will investigative reporting survive? Alarmed by the decline of major American newspapers, journalists and media analysts have raised the question with increasing urgency. According to Robert McChesney and John Nichols, “Journalism is collapsing, and with it comes the most serious threat in our lifetimes to self-government and the rule of law as it has been understood here in the United States.” The model scene for this argument is the Washington Post’s coverage of the Watergate scandal, a classic whistleblower story that eventually brought down President Nixon. If newspapers collapse, who will have the resources to pursue that kind of story to its bitter end?

Another strain of this conversation is more sanguine. What’s collapsing isn’t journalism as such but newspapers with regional monopolies. Investigative reporting will survive, but it but will be more “collaborative.” In this scenario, organizations like the Center for Investigative Reporting will develop stories and then produce multiple versions for larger outlets across media platforms.

Both sides of this conversation often ignore a historical fact: namely, periods of vibrant muckraking are the exception, not the rule. Consider the two biggest stories of the last decade: the invasion of Iraq and the creation of an unprecedented housing bubble. Far from exposing the wrongdoing behind those two events, Big Media ignored, condoned, or even abetted it.

Another element missing from the discussion: When hard-hitting investigative reporting does flourish, it seems to require a complex and delicate symbiosis of mainstream and alternative journalism. This symbiosis may be collaborative in the broad sense, but it need not be friendly. In fact, some of the most interesting “collaborations” have been between organizations that were openly hostile to one another.

This point is best illustrated by the history of Ramparts magazine, the nation’s premier muckraker during a period of intense investigative reporting. Founded as a Catholic literary quarterly in 1962, Ramparts was soon running splashy exposés on Vietnam and the CIA. Most of its major stories came from whistleblowers. After investigating the leads, Ramparts staffers co-wrote the stories in a conscious effort to emulate Time magazine. With the help of advertising guru Howard Gossage, Ramparts publicized the stories heavily, frequently taking out full-page advertisements in major newspapers.

Their innovation paid off. By 1967, with its total circulation approaching 250,000, Ramparts received the prestigious George Polk Award for excellence in magazine journalism. But Ramparts’ success always depended heavily on the attention of larger and more powerful publications. Chief among those were the New York Times, which turned Ramparts’ exposés into national news, and Time magazine, whose attempts to dismiss those stories invariably amplified them.

The Ramparts staff openly acknowledged its “special relationship” with the New York Times. Ramparts used the New York Times to inject its biggest stories into the culture’s bloodstream, and the Times used Ramparts to beat its direct competitors to the punch. According to Peter Collier, Ramparts editors kept score by counting the number of front-page stories they placed in the Times. Nothing then or now attracted more media attention.

If Ramparts’ relationship to the New York Times was special, its connection to Time was extraordinary. Almost from the beginning, Time was wary of the Bay Area upstart. Over time, that wariness developed into open contempt. Unable to contradict Ramparts’ major stories, Time took aim at the messenger. Ramparts, Time claimed in 1967, was “the sensation-seeking New Left-leaning monthly.” Readers who were concerned about CIA malfeasance were captive to “the emotionalism of young Americans who worship honesty.” Responding to a Ramparts story on the effects of napalming Vietnamese children—a story that led Martin Luther King Jr. to speak out against the war for the first time—Time claimed that Ramparts was “slick enough to lure the unwary and bedazzled reader into accepting flimflam as fact.”

But the primary source of Time’s animosity was Ramparts’ adept use of mainstream media techniques. Unlike its stodgier eastern counterparts and its grittier underground ones, Ramparts used Time’s methods to advance a diametrically opposed politics. For the first time in U.S. history, a “radical slick” was reaching big audiences—and blowing their minds.

Ramparts’ success was short-lived. It filed for bankruptcy in 1969 and never fully regained its power to rock the establishment. By that time, larger outlets were picking up their game, and Ramparts had to compete with magazines created partly in its image. These included Rolling Stone and Mother Jones, both of which were founded by Ramparts alumni. Another contributor, Lowell Bergman, went on to co-found the Center for Investigative Reporting and produce major stories for 60 Minutes and Frontline. (Al Pacino played him in The Insider.)

What does the short, unruly life of Ramparts magazine tell us about investigative reporting today? Former editor Robert Scheer recently claimed that Truthdig, the award-winning political website he now edits, is “Ramparts on speed.” But few websites have mastered what Ramparts veteran Adam Hochshild described as the magazine’s simple formula: “Find an exposé that major newspapers are afraid to touch, publish it with a big enough splash so they can’t afford to ignore it … and then publicize it in a way that plays the press off against each other.” If the formula is simple, its skillful execution has been sporadic. Most news organizations are trying to make money, not history. Among those that are willing to publish controversial stories, few have the publicity chops to force big outlets to run them.

Ramparts’ remarkable history suggests that investigative journalism’s best chance for survival is a media ecology that includes savvy fringe players and larger outlets—not necessarily newspapers—that can be played off against each other. Since many large outfits are likely to survive the current shakeout, and since there has never been a “business model” for these fringe players, there’s little reason to believe that investigative reporting will fare any better or worse than it has over the last four decades.

In fact, there’s some evidence that the muckraking impulse is alive and well. Last month at the Netroots Nation conference, Esther Kaplan of the Nation Institute led a practicum on the fundamentals of investigative reporting. Eager bloggers packed the room and came away with solid information on how to access court records, tax filings, corporate disclosures, and other documents that often inform major stories.

Will these bloggers replace newspaper reporters in tomorrow’s media ecology? That’s not clear, but throughout the 1960s, such reporters were consistently outperformed by young and comparatively inexperienced journalists working far from the corridors of power. There’s no reason to think that couldn’t happen again.

###

Peter Richardson is the author of A Bomb in Every Issue: How the Short, Unruly Life of Ramparts Magazine Changed America.