Tilted Forum Project Discussion Community - View Single Post - Is the Primary Role of the US Press to Uncover and Report "Secrets of the Powerful"?

host · 03-12-2008, 01:07 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by loquitur

the question as posed makes no sense. Who is "powerful"? How do you define it? Is a union leader powerful? Head of a NGO? A local neighborhood organizer?

And what does "Uncover and report" mean? Suppose there is no lawbreaking or unethical behavior?

And I thought the purpose of the press is to report the news and provide a forum for opinions. Sometimes powerful people (however defined) do things that are newsworthy (whether good or bad). Sometimes non-powerful people do things that are newsworthy (whether good or bad).

In principle, at least, the press writ large isn't supposed to be grinding axes for its own agenda. That's not to say that some segments of the press should be - I.F. Stone, for example, used to do a fair amount of investigative journalism and was very good at it, and he had a very definite point of view. Dan Rather used to fancy himself an heir to that sort of approach, though he wasn't as careful as Stone was.

loquitur, this is a description of accomplishment any serious practitioner of the profession of journalism should be attempting to emulate now, as then:

Quote:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/rockefe...p_tarbell.html
.....Instantly popular with readers, <a href="http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/rockefellers/sfeature/sf_7.html">"The History of the Standard Oil Company"</a> grew to be a nineteen-part series, published between November 1902 and October 1904. Tarbell wrote a detailed exposé of Rockefeller’s unethical tactics, sympathetically portraying the plight of Pennsylvania’s independent oil workers. Still, she was careful to acknowledge Rockefeller’s brilliance and the flawlessness of the business structure he had created. She did not condemn capitalism itself, but "the open disregard of decent ethical business practices by capitalists." About Standard Oil, she wrote: "They had never played fair, and that ruined their greatness for me."

Tarbell capped the series with a two-part character study that revealed her fixation with the man she had been studying for the better part of five years. Focusing on Rockefeller’s weary appearance, he called him "the oldest man in the world -- a living mummy," and accused him of being "money-mad" and "a hypocrite." "Our national life is on every side distinctly poorer, uglier, meaner, for the kind of influence he exercises," she concluded. Rockefeller was deeply hurt by this last attack from "that poisonous woman," as he called her, but he refused to engage in any public rebuttal of her allegations. "Not a word," he told his advisors. "Not a word about that misguided woman."

"The History of the Standard Oil Company" would be hailed as a landmark in the history of investigative journalism, as well as the most comprehensive study of the building of Rockefeller’s oil empire. In 1999 it was listed number five among the top 100 works of twentieth-century American journalism.

<center>Rockefeller’s rise:

The strides the firm of Rockefeller & Andrews made after the former went into it were attributed, for three or four years, mainly to [his] extraordinary capacity for bargaining and borrowing. Then its chief competitors began to suspect something. Rockefeller might get his oil cheaper now and then, they said, but he could not do it often. He might make close contracts for which they had neither the patience nor the stomach. He might have an unusual mechanical and practical genius in his partner. But these things could not explain all. They believed they bought, on the whole, almost as cheaply as he, and they knew they made as good oil and with as great, or nearly as great, economy. He could sell at no better price than they. Where was his advantage? There was but one place where it could be, and that was in transportation.
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I can't see Ms. Tarbell attending an "off the record" weekend at J.D. Rockefeller's invitation, can you? It didn't take "access" to the subject of her journalistic inquiry and reporting for her to achieve such an enduring and admired work.