Values, Ethics, and Democracy

In 1887, a young reporter left her job at the Pittsburgh Dispatch to seek her fortune in New York City. Only twenty-three years old, Elizabeth “Pink” Cochrane had grown tired of writing for the society pages and answering letters to the editor. She wanted to be on the front page. But at that time, it was considered “unladylike” for women journalists to use their real names, so the Dispatch editors, borrowing from a Stephen Foster song, had dubbed her “Nellie Bly.”

After four months of persistent job-hunting and freelance writing, Nellie Bly earned a tryout at Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World, the nation’s biggest paper. Her assignment: to investigate the deplorable conditions at the Women’s Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell’s Island. Her method: to get herself declared mad and committed to the asylum. After practicing the look of a disheveled lunatic in front of mirrors, wandering city streets unwashed and seemingly dazed, and terrifying her fellow boarders in a New York rooming house by acting crazy, she succeeded in convincing doctors and officials to commit her. Other New York newspapers reported her incarceration, speculating on the identity of this “mysterious waif,” this “pretty crazy girl” with the “wild, hunted look in her eyes.”¹

Her two-part story appeared in October 1887 and caused a sensation. She was the first reporter to pull off such a stunt. In the days before so-called objective journalism, Nellie Bly’s dramatic first-person accounts documented harsh cold baths (“three buckets of water over my head—ice cold water—into my eyes, my ears, my nose and my mouth”); attendants who abused and taunted patients; and newly arrived immigrant women, completely sane, who were committed to this “rat trap” simply because no one could understand them. After the exposé, Bly was famous. Pulitzer gave her a permanent job, and New York City committed $1 million toward improving its asylums.

Within a year, Nellie Bly had exposed a variety of shady scam artists, corrupt politicians and lobbyists, and unscrupulous business practices. Posing as an “unwed mother” with an unwanted child, she uncovered an outfit trafficking in newborn babies. And disguised as a sinner in need of reform, she revealed the appalling conditions at a home for “unfortunate women.” A lifetime champion of women and the poor, Nellie Bly pioneered what was then called detective or stunt journalism. Her work inspired the twentieth-century practice of investigative journalism—from Ida Tarbell’s exposés of oil corporations in the early 1900s to the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting, awarded to Paige St. John of the Sarasota Herald-Tribune for her work on “the weaknesses in the murky property-insurance system vital to Florida homeowners, providing handy data to assess insurer reliability and stirring regulatory action.”²

One problem facing journalism today is that in the last few years, traditional print and broadcast newsrooms have dramatically cut back on news investigations, which are expensive and time-consuming, even though readers and viewers want more of them, not less. Mary Walton, reporting about investigative work for American Journalism Review, made this point in 2010: “Kicked out, bought out or barely hanging on, investigative reporters are a vanishing species in the forests of dead tree media and missing in action on Action News. I-Teams are shrinking or, more often, disappearing altogether. Assigned to cover multiple beats, multitasking backpacking reporters no longer have time to sniff out hidden stories, much less write them.”³ She reported that Investigative Reporters and Editors [IRE] membership “fell more than 30 percent, from 5,391 in 2003, to a 10-year low of 3,695 in 2009.”⁴

But encouragingly the slack has been picked up, at least partially, by nontraditional and online media. In 2013 Jason Stverak, writing for Watchdog.org, notes: “Today, nonprofit news groups across the country are providing the ‘unsexy and repetitive’ coverage that the old-guard press began abandoning at the turn of the century. … [N]onprofit news groups will lead the way in conducting investigative reports and keeping elected officials open and honest.”⁵ And in 2013 IRE reported that its membership had climbed up to 4,400.

JOURNALISM IS THE ONLY MEDIA ENTERPRISE that democracy absolutely requires—and it is the only media practice and business that is specifically mentioned and protected by the U.S. Constitution. However, with the major decline in investigative reporting and traditional news audiences, the collapse of many newspapers, and the rise of twenty-four-hour cable news channels and Internet news blogs, mainstream journalism is searching for new business models and better ways to connect with the public.

In this chapter, we examine the changing news landscape and definitions of journalism. We will:

As you read this chapter, think about how often you look at the news in a typical day. What are some of the recent events or issues you remember reading about in the news? Where is the first place you go to find information about a news event or issue? If you start with a search engine, what newspapers or news organizations do you usually end up looking at? Do you prefer opinion blogs over news organizations for your information? Why or why not? Do you pay for news—either by buying a newspaper or news magazine or by going online? For more questions to help you understand the role of journalism in our lives, see “Questioning the Media” in the Chapter Review.