Investigative journalism's role in history

It would be best if American society had no need for investigative journalism. If only government leaders and corporate executives did the right thing for their constituencies, journalists could concentrate on writing about how the system is working well.

But that is not how the powerful in American society tend to operate, as veteran journalist Pete Hamill notes in the foreword to the superb anthology "Shaking the Foundations." "As I write, there's an atmosphere of triumphant right-wing vindication in the air over the war in Iraq," Hamill says, "and a sneering dismissal of those who refuse to embrace the conventional pieties. But even the story of the war remains hidden, incomplete, buried behind the image-mongering. We should be reassured by one thing — investigative reporters are at work, methodically separating myth from fact, propaganda from actuality."

Since the beginning of the American experience, journalists have often been disrespected by the powerful; it is difficult to love the messenger of bad news with the potential to disturb the established order. Journalists have often been honored by the powerless, for whom they might be the court of last resort. This duality is expressed through the shorthand formulation that the role of journalists is to "comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable."

Within today's journalism world is a small band of reform-minded individuals called "investigative reporters." Bruce Shapiro, a contemporary investigative reporter who also teaches a class on investigative reporting at Yale University, thinks it is important for the public to know about a journalistic tradition that goes back to the 1790s.

Hence, this 500-plus-page sampler of three dozen examples of investigative reporting.

Shapiro apologizes for several omissions, both historical and contemporary. But there is no need — no anthology can include everything, and this one is plenty thick. Some of the 36 included writers are well-known today. Others are forgotten. Each is worthy, and most are downright exciting.

The anthology opens with Benjamin Franklin Bache, proprietor of the Philadelphia Aurora & General Advertiser, exposing corruption in the nascent federal Congress and executive branch circa 1795. The anthology ends with Newsday correspondent Roy Gutman exposing war crimes in Bosnia, plus Chicago Tribune reporters Ken Armstrong (now with The Seattle Times) and Steve Mills exposing fatal flaws in the justice system. Their investigation yielded rare meaningful change, as the Illinois governor declared a death-penalty moratorium in case the state was about to execute an innocent defendant.

In between 1795 and 2000, Shapiro shares the work of one courageous investigative reporter after another: Ida B. Wells risking her livelihood and perhaps her life during the 1890s by daring to expose the racists lynching African Americans throughout the South; Vera Connolly documenting the shameful conditions of Native Americans during the 1920s in, of all places, Good Housekeeping magazine; I.F. Stone publishing his barely break-even weekly newsletter for decades into the 1960s to chronicle federal government deceptions.

There are plenty of household names included, too: Herman Melville (How many readers of the novel "Moby Dick" realized that in the mid-1800s the author also practiced cause-based journalism?), Nellie Bly, Lincoln Steffens, Ida Tarbell, Upton Sinclair, Drew Pearson, Ralph Nader (before he entered electoral politics), Rachel Carson, Seymour Hersh, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein.

Even chronic media haters who pay attention to the selections in this anthology would have to concede this: Investigative reporters have played a significant role throughout the American democratic experiment.

Steve Weinberg is a free-lance investigative reporter in Columbia, Mo.