So long as no one tells the story of a middle class under siege, every American family in trouble experiences flat incomes, rising costs and increasing risks as their own problem — not a systemic problem. And every politician is off the hook: No need to do anything, if the problems stay hidden.
Investigative journalists — the ones who dig deep to collect data and tell the stories that someone wants hidden — are crucial to the ultimate safety of the middle class. And that’s why I felt sick when I learned that reporters Don Barlett and Jim Steele had been laid off. I remembered their extraordinary work on the bankruptcy bill — a seven-page article in Time Magazine that Senator Ted Kennedy laid directly on the desk of President Bill Clinton. When Clinton later vetoed the bankruptcy bill, Barlett and Steele could take as much credit as anyone for exposing this terrible bill.
Chuck Lewis, also an investigative journalist extraordinaire, offers his thought for Warren Reports:
I first began reading the peerless work of Don Barlett and Jim Steele in the early 1970s, when they were producing computer-assisted reporting about the criminal justice system in Philadelphia, about the 1974 OPEC oil embargo and allegations of price manipulation by the U.S. oil companies. Their work at the Philadelphia Inquirer for approximately a quarter century was nothing short of stunning, winning two Pulitzer Prizes.
Their investigative, 11-part series, “America: What Went Wrong?” about economic issues facing the middle class in the nation, rarely discussed by the news media in the United States, caused a national sensation. In Philadelphia, there were lines of hundreds of people outside the newspaper, attempting to buy reprints of the articles. How often do you see that in any city today? It prompted roughly 10,000 requests for new subscriptions to the newspaper, reprints of the series sold 250,000 copies and the paperback book published from the articles sold more than 600,000 copies, making it a national bestseller.
I have met and worked with the best investigative reporters in the world, as founder of the Center for Public Integrity and its International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, a working network of nearly 100 premier practitioners from 48 countries. I have appeared on panels with Jim or Don or both at investigative reporting conferences in the United States and in Europe. All I can say is that among the preeminent journalists in the world today, Don Barlett and Jim Steele, who eventually left the Inquirer and went to Time Inc., are regarded as the top, top shelf, simply the best. It is unfathomable that Time would be letting them and 600 other people go.
More disposable Americans, to use Louis Uchitelle’s phrase from his new book, The Disposable American, except that no journalists in this country have chronicled more powerfully or poignantly how companies dispose of their employees than Barlett and Steele. For it to now happen to them is the cruelest and most bitter irony.
But, sadly, things are even worse than that. Journalism itself is under an economic siege. For decades, the owners of news organizations in America have been “harvesting” the profits from their enterprises at obscene levels with only modest investments in new technologies in this rapidly changing world, and they are keeping those profit numbers high more and more by gutting the newsgathering staffs.
The reason so much of our news is vanilla and bland is that the number of reporters keeps going down, with fewer people assigned to do more stories, year in and year out. You cannot attempt investigative journalism, truth-to-power reporting, under those circumstances. It is physically impossible. Last year, according to the Project on Excellence in Journalism, the annual profit margin for newspapers in the U.S. was 20 percent, double the average for other major industry sectors. Since 2000, 3,500 newsroom professionals, 7 percent of the editorial workforce nationwide, have been fired.
Today the Philadelphia Inquirer has half the number of reporters covering the Philadelphia metropolitan area than it did 20 years ago. That unfortunately is happening in cities across America. How low will the death spiral go? What does it say about the state of journalism in America today when the most respected investigative reporting duo in history is no longer worth it to the owners?
This ought to be a soul-searching moment for us all, that it is past time for some exciting new publishing approaches and, frankly, some new owners who actually share our editorial values.
