The New Muckraking Age (article) by David Arthur Walters on AuthorsDen

Muckrakers of the world, unite and respond to the New Gilded Age “If the country is to be governed with the consent of the governed, then the governed must arrive at opinions about what their governors want them to consent to. How do they do this? They do it by hearing on the radio and reading in the newspapers what the corps of correspondents tells them is going on in Washington and the country at large and in the world. Here we perform an essential service… we do what every sovereign citizen is supposed to do, but had not the time or the interest to do for himself. This is our job. It is no mean calling, and we have a right to be proud of it.” (Walter Lippman) "It is the job of a newspaperman to spur the lazy, watch the weak, expose the corrupt. He must be the eyes, ears, and nose of the American people." Drew Pearson I was approached in Miami last week by a man who claimed that certain elected officials and a prominent newspaper editor were being bribed by real estate developers. He said the newspaper editor was using his power to protect the interests of certain developers who had bribed him with special inside real estate deals. The editor, he said, made sure investigative reporting would be directed against their opponents. He said he believed I should look into the corruption because I might make a big name for myself as an independent journalist. Since my agonizing efforts to conform to the conventions of organized greed in order to gain gainful employment in Miami had been to no avail, I was sorely tempted by the man's claims to do some muckraking, to follow in the footsteps of the great muckrakers of old, who did not discriminate: they treated all muck equally. As it turned out, the man who would have incited me to muckraking had no evidence whatsoever of the corruption he had alleged: he had nothing more than rumors about a gang called "The Great White Sharks of Miami Real Estate." Of course the real estate "news" in the press is really advertising; but that is to be expected and is not to be equated with a criminal conspiracy. Corruption can be found everywhere given human nature, but it helps to have a definite lead, especially in the form of a bit of evidence to begin with. I recalled the last time I had taken a keen interest in muckraking. Many years ago, an envelope with no return address and with contents of unknown origin was tossed onto the driver's seat of my Mark IV while I was having a beer at the pub. I started following up on the details outlined by the report in the envelope. I supposed the matter was just another conspiracy theory, but I asked around anyway. Shortly thereafter, I was visited by a man who said he was a cop on the organized crime task force; he said a hit had been put out on me, and he wanted to know what I knew. I gave him the report, said that is all I knew, and said I intended to make no further inquiries. Another cop, an old neighbor of mine, said I should arm myself with two guns - a clean one to be stashed away in case my assailant didn't have one on him after I shot him - and advised me of the precise legal length for a sawed-down shotgun. The guns were grist for a novel but were not really for me. Nothing ever came of the whole thing. It was with that recollection in mind that I dropped the idea of doing some Miami muckraking and continued with my job search. Miami, incidentally, is known for being the most corrupt city in the United States. That should make it a virtual utopia for muckraking journalists. But I am not on the newspaper's payroll, so why should I bother with muckraking when I really need to be buckraking? Given my dire circumstances, what I would do if I were offered a piece of the action? I asked myself. Maybe if I made some noise, I would be brought in from the cold, I considered. But no, godfathers are not what they used to be. Even the bosses have been dumbed down - or dumbed up, if you please - and they let troublemakers run wild instead of bringing them into the fold or else. This set of bosses will not last long. Another set will take their place. I'll just mind my own business, I told myself. At the most, I might write something about the original muckrakers. The muckrakers were the dirt diggers of the Progressive movement. Progressives deplored the miserable results of unbridled individualism and laissez-faire economics. They disparaged the exploitation of society by strangle-holding corporations and business barons. Progressives believed that the people’s government should control the people's economic affairs - government must bridle business. The muckrakers looked under the big rocks and reported the details of economic and political corruption underneath. Teddy Roosevelt, quoting John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, came up with the pejorative term: "The Man with the Muckrake... who could look no way but downward." The term become one of endearment to an outraged public that had a taste for reading articles in mass magazines about the corruption of its civic leaders and institutions. Scattered dissent was thus whipped up into a national crusade. Teddy himself fell in with the muckrakers. Lincoln Steffens was known as the "original muckraker." He made a name for himself investigating municipal corruption in 1902 and 1903. His reports were written for S.S. McClure's McClure's magazine when he was its managing editor, and were compiled in the book, Shame of the Cities. Mr. Steffens refused to take credit for inventing muckraking: he attributed original muckraking to Old Testament prophets and other disgruntled ancients. He also gave credit to the pre-muckrakers (including himself) of the 1890s, who were eager to find fault with "things as they are." They despised the polished, regurgitated pap in print, wanting the plain truth instead. In fact, the pre-muckraking period extends back to the Civil War and constituted the criticism of the Gilded Age; Henry Adams, Edward Bellamy and others grandfathered the Muckraking Age. Lincoln Steffens, like those fundamentalists who aver that humankind is corrupt in its very origin, opined that municipal leaders throughout the nation were generally corrupt, then went from city to city proving it - he deemed St. Louis to be the biggest shame of the shameful. A few big shots admitted they were corrupt; they admitted they were quite shamed of it since he had pointed it out, but what else could they do? If man's nature is corrupt, and if the American Way is the natural way, one might legitimately ask, how else could political leaders govern but by taking advantage of the corruption, by organizing the greed? In 1897, Lincoln Steffens and his colleagues took over and remade New York's oldest newspaper at the time, The Commercial Advertiser, with Mr. Steffens serving as its city editor. He had a pet peeve: he did not like professional reporters and he did not want them on his staff. He wanted young, inexperienced writers. "I wanted fresh, young, enthusiastic writers who would see and make others see the life of the city. This meant individual styles." Not that Mr. Steffens wanted illiterates or inexperienced writers, say, of the caliber of Theodore Dreiser when he started out. Mr. Dreiser, whom he knew, had attended parochial schools and one public school. One of his teachers sponsored him for a year at Indiana University. Young Mr. Dreiser could barely complete a sentence when he ran off the Chicago and got his first newspaper job. He eventually became the leading sensationalist or 'naturalist' journalist in the country, and then abandoned reporting for abject poverty; his brother saved him and he eventually became a successful novelist, a writer whose style is often described as powerful and crude. That is the sort of cub I might have been after I ran away to Chicago - alas, I was born to late. That is not the kind of uncultivated cub Mr. Steffens, with his good education, wanted on his sophisticated newspaper. Mr. Steffens, a graduate of the University of California at Berkeley, sought out new writers for the Commercial Advertiser from the graduating classes of Harvard, Yale, Princeton and Columbia. "Mr. verbal advertisement and my announced rules drew the right kind of young man," he recounted in his autobiography. "I would take fellows, I said, whose professor of English believed they were going to be able to write and who themselves wanted to be writers, provided, however, that they did not intend to be journalists. 'We' had use for any one who, openly or secretly, hoped to be a poet, a novelist, or an essayist.... No one would be kept long in any department; as soon as a reporter became expert in one branch of work, he would be turned into another. This was not for their sakes, but for ours also. When a reporter no longer saw red at a fire, when he was so used to police news that a murder was not a human tragedy but only a crime, he would not write police news for us. We preferred the fresh staring eyes to the informed mind and the blunted pencil. To express if not to enforce this, I used to warn my staff that whenever a reporter became a good all-round newspaperman he would be fired. And to encourage each man to form and write in his own style, I declared that if any two reporters came to write alike, one of them would have to go." When Mr. Steffens took a position on the editorial staff at Everybody's Magazine several years later, he insisted that the staff "find and form" their own cubs. He wanted a different sort of magazine, one that would stand apart from newspapers: other magazines recruited experienced newspaper reporters, and wound up publishing Sunday and weekly newspapers. He made a bet with his fellow editors: "Give me an intelligent college-educated man for a year, and I'll make a good journalist out of him." They eventually caved in, and agreed to pay the salary for a select undergraduate, but they insisted that he take his pick as his own secretary and train him as a magazine writer. If, after one year, the cub manages to get something accepted by the magazine editors, they would agree with his hypothesis. Mr. Steffens asked his contacts at Harvard to refer him to "the ablest mind that could express itself in writing." He got his chance to win the bet when young Harvard grad Walter Lippman, whom he had met in 1908, asked him for a job. Mr. Steffens was about to launch a probe of Wall Street's manipulations of the nation's bank, and eagerly took him on as an assistant in 1910. Mr. Steffens eventually submitted a piece under his own name, one that had been written by Mr. Lippman. When the piece was accepted by the editors, Mr. Steffens revealed his ploy and the editors had to admit that he had won his bet. Not only did he make a good journalist out of Mr. Lippman, he managed to turn him into a certified cynic. Working together, their investigation and reporting on the financial corruption of banks by Wall Street manipulators led to a Congressional investigation and the Federal Reserve Act of 1913. They even managed to convince the townsmen of Greenwich that their nice, prosperous town was just as corrupt as cities notorious for their corruption. Mr. Steffens once said that he believed the common man was just as corrupt as his corrupt business and political leaders, and would be better off governed by party bosses. But he concluded the Greenwich town meeting with the statement that "the remedy of these things is Christianity." Muckraking had seen its heyday during the Progressive-Populist era and was in decline. It was good at exposing faults but offered little in the way of solutions. They often fell back on the concepts of classical economic liberalism: the virtuous small entrepreneur, free competition, free trade and the like, outmoded concepts that are still bandied about rhetorically today in support of programs that in reality have resulted in the consolidation of business enterprises into an economic oligarchy, the long-range planning of big corporations and the attendant restraints on competition, presided over by a mean-minded, dog-eat-dog, independent shopkeeper mentality. The progress of the productions of goods and the attendant social evils of the scientific-industrial revolution, and the necessity for the scientific management of business and economics, eventually attracted muckrakers and critical thinkers like Lincoln Steffens and Walter Lippman to the socialist camp. Socialism, after all, seemed to address the causes of economic distress instead of dwelling on the symptoms of the diseases of capitalism. Lincoln Steffens was a sort of Christian socialist with a positivistic bent acquired from his psychology professors in Leipzig (Wilhelm Wundt) and Paris (Jean Martin Charcot). He seemed to care more for his paradoxical style of writing than the facts: he punctured the dogma that success depends on moral worth, demonstrating that ostensibly good men are evil. His radicalism eventually alienated the America public. He wound up in Europe, where he was favored by expatriots. He did not adopt any particular doctrine or party, but he expressed satisfaction with several of the communist actions. After dropping in on Petrograd in 1919 to study the Revolution, he made the famous statement: "I have seen the future and it works." Walter Lippman soon became fed up with his mentor's reliance on Jesus. He said Lincoln Steffens was "increasingly a kind of Christian anarchist saint," and that his reliance on Jesus was "too whimsical for a steady diet." Mr. Lippman had a taste for statistics, the gathering and analysis of facts, and scientific, top-down management. His affection for sociological study and expertise attracted him to the Fabian faction for a while, but he eventually renounced socialism and Marxism as well as muckraking. He took care to denounce muckraking for its antipathy to large corporations. He believed corporations were economically necessary for scientific-industrial progress, a progression governed by natural law; i.e., by reason. Wherefore one must welcome change and go with the inevitable flow as guided by reason. Although he sympathized with socialist programs and rejected government by an elite, he was at heart a classical aristocratic conservative. His faith in the virtues of scientific management separated from ownership was naïve – the management technocracy took on a plutocratic form with greed its guide and Mammon its god. Mr. Lippman believed strong unions were necessary for the democratization of industry necessary to achieve political democracy, yet he believed democracy was a virtually impossible proposition because citizens could no longer rationally judge public issues: the speed and complexity of modern life renders events incomprehensible to ordinary people; mass media cannot keep up with events and provide comprehensive interpretations, therefore slogans designed to arouse emotions are presented to the public instead. He believed that his role as a journalist was to fight the tendency of people to divide themselves into good and bad, one half trying to prove how good a man is, the other half how evil. What kind of picture of the world should good journalism present? A true picture, of course. The muckrakers were true journalists in their desire to tell the truth. But for Mr. Steffens the socialist, in contrast to Mr. Lippman’s aristocratic view of reality, the truth was apparently known by the public before it was reported on: "My picture of the world as it seemed to be," wrote Mr. Steffens, "was much the same as my readers. It was this that made me a pretty good journalist; it is this that makes good journalism. The reporter and the editor must sincerely share the cultural ignorance, the superstitions, the beliefs, of their readers, and keep no more than one edition ahead of them. You may beat the public to the news, not to the truth." Cultural ignorance, superstitions, and beliefs reflected by the free press as if it were a mirror is not the stuff enlightened democracies are made of. If the public gazes at its ignorance, credulity, and corruption in The Daily Public Mirror long enough, perhaps it will offend itself and take certain steps to improve its appearance. Incidentally, William Randolph Hearst, who was a subject of Mr. Steffen's muckraking and who wanted to be the democratic Caesar of the United States, would probably disagree with that view: he found that the public largely wants most of all to be entertained, not to be edified, and that it finds the most scandalous sort of conduct the most entertaining. Apparently the public knows and loves its own corruption. A good journalist, then, should have a taste for corruption, should be a muckraker at heart, really. After all, muck is muck. Lincoln Steffens thought S.S. McClure "was a good journalist, one of the best I ever knew, and he knew it, and he knew why.... 'If I like a thing,' McClure said, 'then I know that millions will like it. My mind and my taste are so common that I'm the best editor.'" Mr. McClure, he recounted, was interested in "startling facts, no in philosophical generalizations. He hated, he feared, my damning theory [of general civic corruption].... I alone was not to give my theory. That was our agreement. When I entered into it, however, I made a mental reservation that while I would indeed load my new article on St. Louis ['The Shamelessness of St. Louis'] with the libelous, dangerous, explosive facts... I would aim them and the whole story, like a gun, at the current popular theories, including Mr. McClure's; and, I hoped, blow them out of the way for a statement later of my own diagnosis, when I was ready to frame one...." Mr. Lippman, as I previously noted, became a certified cynic with Mr. Steffens as his mentor. On one occasion he turned his muckraking talents to the mythologically free press. John Milton and J.S. Mill among others had argued ever so eloquently that liberty depends on a free press, the so-called "bible of democracy." Most school children who studied their lessons well would certainly agree. Free speech is a wonderful thing, but people have frequent occasion to lie and they freely do so. The free press, however, is presumably not free to lie. Further, it must take care lest it involuntarily deceive the public. The free press, we reason after reading the enthusiastic advocates, is a quasi-public institution that has a sacred duty to report the facts and to protect the public from lies with contrary truths. The existence and development of a virtuous democracy depends on a truly informed people. Of course unintentional errors and deliberate lies might appear in the papers from time to time, but truth shall inevitably crowd out falsity, or so the theory goes. A democracy without an independent press that is free to report the truth would be a sham democracy. Walter Lippman knew from his propaganda work during the war that the press is a manipulable institution. He teamed up with his friend Charles Merz to test newspaper bias. They examined the New York Times' coverage of the Bolshevik Revolution over a period of three years beginning with the overthrow of Tsar in 1917. Their conclusions took the form of a report entitled 'A Test of the News.' The New York Times coverage was inaccurate and biased. Far from the facts, the coverage was "dominated by the hopes of the men who composed the news organization." Some of the events reported simply had not taken place. Atrocities were reported that never occurred. The Time erroneously reported that the Bolshevik revolution about to collapse ninety-one times. The "news" was, to wit, wishful thinking. "The chief censor and the chief propagandist were hope and fear in the minds of reporters and editors," the Lippman-Merz report read. Reporters relied on hearsay and their imagination when writing the "news." Although they did not try to deliberately suppress the truth, the were guilty of "boundless credulity." Their contributions were "about as useful a that of an astrologer or alchemist." Newspaper reporting has "improved" since it has been standardized. At least the information is presented in such a mechanical and unemotional way in the columns, in the form of a top-down pyramid, that the reports and analyses and opinions appear to reflect objective reality. But the appearance is all too illusory. The "scientific" managers at the apex of the news pyramid, the publishers and editors who make sure information and the heads of journalists who report it are ground down to points, do not have a feel for the truth at the base of the structure; or they know it and do not care about it or want to suppress it for one reason or the other. Having been fooled so many times, even the generally credulous public has no faith at all in the credibility of the press: journalists are ranked even lower than politicians for honesty and credibility. A number of reasons are given for the decline in newspaper subscriptions, including the rise of electronic media and a corresponding foreshortening of attention spans, and the general opinion that the press has sold its soul to advertisers, who in turn represent the postmodern satan: Corporate. But the public is not as stupid as intellectuals would like to believe they are in order to elevate their superegos, nor are advertisers entirely to blame for the low regard the public has of the press. Walter Lippman had a fascinating pet theory on that subject: it is not the prejudices of the advertisers that dictate press bias, but that of the prejudiced reading public. By way of analogy, we might say that it is not the president who endangers the American people and the world, but rather those who voted for him. Now we may call the president a moron, and say his followers, particularly those who need no god when their president is in office, are simply fools who have been duped. But they are not as dimwitted as they appear to be. At least they know what they presently want, and may the pretexts to get it be damned, if need be, if they want blood. It seems that the public is in fact better informed on many things today, thanks to the free press, including the general unreliability the news reports, the slavishness of the mythologically free press, the greed of the publishers, the increasing power of advertisers, the corruption of journalists, and the stupidity of many editors. The deductive corporate pyramid scheme is bound to fold without the inductive flow: the logical virtues of the 'Shield of David' should be studied, as well as the structure of the Diamond Thunderbolt, the double Tetragrammaton. The press is making itself as irrelevant as the free sidewalk rags, the frustrated major dailies who pose as counter-cultural alternatives. All that, together with the boring, "objective" style of writing, is seldom reported on as a cause for the waning subscription numbers, yet it is a cause. However that might be, we should give Mr. Steffens credit for being the first great American newspaper muckraker of the Muckraking Age. Thanks to him, Ray Stannard Baker, Ida M. Tarbell, Charles Edward Russell. Edwin Markham, Thomas W. Lawson, Upton Sinclair, Sinclair Lewis, Samuel Hopkins Adams, David Graham Phillips, Brad Whitlock and others, and to all those who followed suit, a great deal of corruption is still being exposed every day of the year to this very day. The established make national scandals out of some of the most egregious cases. Yet I suspect that appropriate research would demonstrate that less and less corruption in proportion to the total corruption exposed by all means is being investigated and reported by the press nowadays . Why not? Muckraking is not an easy way for an aspiring writer to make a fortune, although a few blackmailers might do well enough. Muckraking does not pay, not unless an employed journalist can get his scoop published by his "respectable" major publication; then he might make a big name for himself, as an employee of the newspaper. It is highly unlikely that a major daily newspaper would publish a muckraking work written by a journalist who is truly independent of the market forces of darkness and corporate board tribalism governing not only analysis and opinion but the news as well. His very independence and unemployment tends to discredit him and leave him free to posting free blogs or unedited news reports and interpretations of events on Internet sites. Once the journalist is accepted by the Establishment's media because his mind has been processed by journalism school; once s/he suits the "market needs" that take precedence over the truth; once s/he is deemed "credible" by the editors; - the journalist, whether on the payroll, syndicated, or an independent contractor, is no longer truly independent. As for the reputable columnists, the appearance of opposing opinions are carefully controlled by publishers and their editors: opinion columns are hardly the mode of genuine muckraking; furthermore, several of the most "reputable" columnists today were not reporters to begin with, but were political hack writers and have a one-sided axe to grind. We must pause to note that certain "independent" pundits published by "respectable" mainstream media have recently been chastised for taking bribes to push a particular political idiotology as if it were the unmitigated truth. Wherefore we are warned by media experts about the "independent" contractors published by the established press; but nothing has been said about the journalists on the payroll; which raises the question: Why should press putas with editors for pimps be more credible than the independents who prostitute themselves to get accepted by the very same editors? Of course professional journalists can and do engage in muckraking on their own time, and they have written some best-selling exposés of the corporate behemoths, or strangulating octopi, if you will, and the political leviathans of our day. They have consolidated and rehashed the news, perhaps adding some original information. Their books can be absorbing reads to scandalmongers, and are particularly appealing to the frustrated wheeler-dealers and Machiavellians who use them as guides for their own devious conduct. Corruption is passé and evokes yawns unless creative writers give it a novel twist. One might say there has been so much muckraking that the cynical public is burned out on it. Still, we have very little muckraking in the original sense, of going, first of all, after the truths of our society, and pursuing society’s exemplars, the high and mighty who make up what we now call "the power elite." The scandals involving the celebrity cult promoted by the media provides plenty of vulgar distractions that keep the public eye off the eight ball they are behind. Indeed, journalists have sold out to capitalism and have become buckrakers instead of muckrakers. Today's big news about newspapers: truth plays second fiddle to money, for money is god. For instance, Tom Fiedler, the Executive Editor of Knight Ridder's Miami Herald informed me that journalists, no matter how well they can write or think, are selected, first of all, according to their ability to suit the "market needs" of the paper, including the racial and ethnic aspects of those needs; he said nothing about the truth, and it appears to many readers that his rag's primary interest is the market needs of the power elite, starting at the national level on down. The Herald's publisher, Alberto Ibarguen, a lawyer by profession, stepped down recently to head up the Knight Foundation. He was roundly applauded for bringing a "market focus" to the sheet. He was replaced as publisher by Jesus Diaz, Jr., an accountant, who is expected to save the paper from its decline in subscriptions. Today's journalists, at least those who are most admired by the public and emulated by their peers, are no longer the poor working stiffs from the laboring classes they used to be, the reporters of the old days who took an interest not only in the sensational street crime that titillated the masses but also the crimes perpetrated by the elite, an elite once despised by the masses but now praised and emulated, or feared and capitulated to. Reporters and journalists are not hired off the street for their writing and thinking abilities. It is highly unlikely that a Theodore Dreiser would find a job even with a free sidewalk rag. First of all, one must buy the right credentials, the credentials that prove, at the very least, ones docility and obedience to authority - hardly the characteristics of a good muckraker. Aspiring journalists, if they wish to become professional journalists instead of independent amateurs, are uniformly processed like sausages in schools of journalism so they may best serve the most powerful interests in the land, while still thinking of themselves as critical thinkers capable of independent thought - the wiser and lazier ones are well aware of and quite satisfied with orthodoxy. And those who climb up the ladder, the top professional journalists, are members of the power elite. They have little knowledge about or affection for the 'Man in the Street' of yore and they regurgitate each other's ideas and jet from speaking engagement to speaking engagement. The top professional journalists are beholden to the powerful for their exalted status. That was not always so. In fact, that prostituted status is the very antithesis of the essence of good journalism. You see, public journalism is essentially a muckraking process. Every true journalist wants to expose the truth; he is essentially a muckraker - given the fact that human nature is corrupt and in want of civilization. The moral turpitude of the mainstream media including the prostituted press is a disgrace to the 'This Great Nation of Ours' touted by the power elite who control the forces of darkness of corporate board tribalism sweeping over our country. The forces of darkness would not have the truth cast in the light of day, for that light would set the many free from the feudally minded few. The press poltroons keep the truth hidden under a basket. Sometimes a ray of light beams through the pretexts of that woven basket, often in the form of information from unidentified but reliable sources, who have been so terrified and intimidated that they have not the courage to openly confront the irresponsible forces of their organizations so that the persons be held accountable and the pernicious systems of Corporate reformed or replaced. "Integrity" is now identified with 'Loyalty', blind loyalty to the mighty regardless of their moral character and ethic. Business, Church, and State are ruled by fear. The word 'Integrity' appears everywhere, on mission statements, in mantras mouthed by the elite; yet when we look to the expert definitions we discover that the experts have not read the dictionaries, particularly the Oxford Unabridged Dictionary, or to the philosophers and historians. Integrity at the highest levels has been identified with an uncompromising and inflexible adherence to the unmitigated lust for Power. Religion worships Power: Politics distributes it; religion is presently identified with politics, and the compassion for nonbelievers is a facade designed to deceived citizens who think they live in a democracy. The doctrine of the neoconservative power elite is, "Might is right", if not "Might makes right". Lying, cheating, stealing, even mass murder is all right if it is practical or pragmatic, if it really works. Wherefore unconscionable thugs well versed in the perverted Anglo-Saxon philosophy that nearly destroyed the civilized world are put on the national pedestal and admired as gods. Indeed, it is said in some parts of 'This Great Nation of Ours,' “Who needs an invisible when the War President is in the White House?” Who said that history does not repeat itself? What we have here is a more highly organized Gilded Age - this is the neo-Gilded Age. Mr. Lippman's "scientific" corporate managers, the managers who would supposedly liberate public corporations from robber barons, have become robber barons wallowing in wealth. Workers today spend most of their lives under a reign of corporate terror. Their pay is lowered, their hours increased, their private and public pension benefits have been and are being stolen and wasted on private luxury and the mass organized murder of war. All this and more is widely known, but hardly anyone is outraged by it - not until it affects him or her personally. And more and more people will suffer, of that we can be sure. What we have here is not progress to a high civilization but regression to the original corruption. If that regression is not halted and soon, this nation will not be great at all. Journalists have an ideal responsibility, to enlighten democracy that it not devolve to dictatorship over populist fascism or communism. The neoconservative movement was formerly called "pseudo-conservative" because its anti-ideology ideology is a travesty: it is not the true conservative philosophy of a Cato or even a Burke. Neoconservatism is a corruption of civilization, a return to brutishness in disguise, masked by the big lie: "We are compassionate conservatives." The present Establishment's media has propagated that lie. The notorious "media liberals" have become wolves in sheep's clothing. Former Democratic and Republic presidents hold hands on the ranch and ride the same horse while the present president drives the Russian fascist's car. Yet we must not speak truthfully about this travesty lest we be called traitors and lose our jobs or not get jobs. So we find very little truth about the awful nature of this travesty in the established press, which is once again the Establishment's press. Where are the muckrakers? Where are the true reporters and journalists of truth? It is no wonder that the press is becoming increasingly irrelevant. That is a shame, because it should lead the way in the exposition of the truth that is required to set our people free. Well, then, perhaps the people will lead the way. Let us all be muckrakers, then, and engage in the unfettered journalism that will serve as the antidote to the fear and indifference to corruption, to the economic and political exploitation and injustice that is presently plague on this country. Curse the accursed plague, then. Forget the Jackson molestation trial and Paula Abdul's love life, and focus on more important muck. Be a leader of the neo-Muckraking Age in response to the neo-Gilded Age. Publish evidence of the corruption of your commercial and political organizations and their corrupt leaders and followers on the Internet. Organize a virtual Muckraking Community, where professional muckrakers can mine the muck for their exposés. Muckrakers of the world, Unite! Dig out the facts. If only I had some facts about the so-called "Great White Sharks of Miami Real Estate", I could write a great muckraking article. I wonder if the Miami Herald would buy it? Would any "reputable" journal in the United States publish this screed? Is there an honest living to be made in muckraking when the truth is considered to be an insult to everyone concerned? Now that I have worked myself up to do some heavy muckraking, I wonder: Where is that envelope with the dirty details? -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- References: The Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens, New York: Harcourt Brace, 1931 Walter Lippman and the American Century, by Ronald Steel, Boston: Little, Brown &Cp 1980 --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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