What’s missing from investigative reporting – Mother Jones

For a personal tribute to Don Barlett, read “‘Hello, I’m Don Barlett and I enjoyed your story'” by our CEO Emeritus Robert Rosenthal.

It’s not often that an obituary truly surprises you, but recently it happened to me in the best way possible. The deceased was not a relative, friend or close colleague. But he played a key role at one point in my life, showing me what journalism can do—and what it often doesn’t.

Barlett was half of Barlett and Steele, a reporting duo every bit as important as Woodward and Bernstein, but in a very different way. When they worked for them Philadelphia InvestigatorsThey embodied the investigative reporting that newspapers once practiced. My colleague Robert Rosenthal, who was her mentee and friend there Requesterhas some moving (and funny!) memories of the duo here.

But I wanted to zoom out a bit because the kind of reporting Barlett and Steele did is special, valuable and endangered, and also because of the thing that surprised me in this obituary: his last line. “Donations in his name may be made to the Center for Investigative Reporting, Box 584, San Francisco, California 94104.” That’s us! The Center for Investigative Reporting is Mother Jones‘ parent organization, and we are something of a Noah’s Ark for this kind of endangered journalism.

I was speechless when I saw this line and here’s why. In 1991, I had just graduated from journalism school, in the middle of a recession and ahead of a presidential campaign, when Barlett and Steele published a series called America: What went wrong? It was a deep insight into the increasing income inequality that has come to dominate the U.S. economy.

The pair worked on the series (and the subsequent book) for many months, and the book opens with a series of thank-you notes that seem like a time capsule: “Lela Young, in the public reading room of the Securities and Exchange Commission in Washington.” But what What’s next could have been written yesterday: There are all these pundits on TV talking about how the economy isn’t so bad and everything is going to be okay, Barlett and Steele note. But then why doesn’t it feel good for so many people? Here we see a huge graphic that looks exactly like the one you created on your Apple Macintosh in 1991 (you can find it on page ix in the Google Books version). It shows that the top 4 percent of Americans earn as much (in wages only, not including capital gains) as the bottom 51 percent.

Perhaps, Barlett and Steele wrote, it’s no wonder that “the stories you read in newspapers and magazines seem to have no bearing on your personal situation.” These stories are not about factories and workplaces closing, about millions of workers going from $15 an hour to $7 an hour. “For the first time this century, members of a generation reaching adulthood” – GenX – “will find it impossible to achieve a better lifestyle than their parents.” Most will not even be able to reach the middle-class status of their parents. “

These Americans, they write, look at the economy from below. “Those in charge, on the other hand, are at the top and looking down. You see things differently. Let’s call it the view from Washington and Wall Street.” These people include corporate executives, Republicans – led by Reagan and George HW Bush – who pushed through tax giveaways, trade deals and deregulation, but also Democrats who got involved.

Imagine the economy like a hockey game, Barlett and Steele continue, “a sport known for its physical violence.” Now imagine what the game would look like if you took away the rules and referees. “That’s essentially what’s happening to the American economy. Someone changed the rules. And there is no referee. That is, there is no one to look after the interests of the middle class. They are the forgotten Americans.”

It’s incredibly impressive to read again 33 years later how accurately Barlett and Steele captured the dynamics that still shape our economy – and our politics. It’s also striking to remember how few mainstream journalists did this kind of reporting, and how many still do it today.

When I started in journalism, in the depths of the recession of the early ’90s, there were still plenty of investigative reporters in newsrooms doing great work, but there was something that defined most of these stories: They were about exposing People who break the rules. Politicians steal the treasury. Construction workers take a nap at taxpayer expense. Reporters uncovered illegal acts, not those that were merely unfair or unjust. And there was a reason for this: mainstream newsrooms had positioned themselves as carefully neutral; Value judgments had no place in her work. But the mission of investigative reporting is fundamentally to show the contrast between the way things are and the way they should be – it’s about exposing Injustice. Every investigative reporter since Ida B. Wells brought lynching into the spotlight has been obsessed with it.

Defining “wrong” as “breaking the rules” was a way to avoid value judgment – ​​but it meant many important stories weren’t being told. Especially stories about systems, such as the growing inequality in the US economy.

That’s what made Barlett and Steele’s reporting so unique and so powerful. What happened to incomes in America was incorrect, it was right in the title of the book. Not because it was against the law (the point was that it was all perfectly legal!) but because it was unfair.

Seeing that journalism is capable of this – it can uncover not only violations of the law, but also systemic injustice – was an eye-opener for me as a young reporter. This is the kind of work I wanted to do, and apparently there were jobs for people who could do it.

Little did I know that most of these jobs would soon disappear. Investigative reporting is expensive, and the corporations and hedge fund investors who bought up America’s newspapers had no intention of paying for it—or, ultimately, for any newsroom jobs. Since Barlett and Steele wrote their series, nearly half of America’s journalism jobs have disappeared (a rate of loss faster than coal mining), and most of the rest are on borrowed time. There are very few journalists who can take the time to delve deeply into a major issue, especially one as difficult as income inequality.

And the idea of ​​journalism as a distanced, value-neutral observer, especially in politics, also persists. I don’t have to tell you how much damage the “he-said-she-said” model has done to campaign reporting. Even now, in the third election of the Trump era, we are seeing media outlets (not all media outlets, always – but it happens far too often) turning extremist disinformation into normal-sounding campaign stories. No wonder one man embodies the self-enrichment and predatory profit-taking practiced by Barlett and Steele America: What went wrong? gets away with portraying himself as a champion of forgotten Americans.

But Don Barlett doesn’t want us to stop at doom and gloom. That’s why his obituary ends with the incredible honor of asking readers to support our work here Mother Jones, Discoverand the Center for Investigative Reporting. Our newsroom has not been taken over by hedge funders and never will be. Our budget comes from you, the people who rely on our journalism to tell it like it is. And because we have to answer to you, and only you, we may Do the kind of reporting that Don Barlett and Jim Steele did, and do it with the same commitment: reveal what’s real incorrecteven if it is completely legal.

Thank you, Don Barlett. We’ll make you proud.