What’s Missing From Investigative Reporting

Mother Jones illustration; Mario Ruiz/Getty

For a personal tribute to Don Barlett, read “‘Hello, I’m Don Barlett and I Liked Your Story’” from our CEO emeritus, Robert Rosenthal.

It’s not often that an obituary truly surprises you, but the other day it happened to me in the best possible way. The person who passed wasn’t a relative, friend, or close colleague. But he did play a key role at one point in my life, by showing me what journalism can do—and often fails to.

Barlett was half of Barlett and Steele, a reporting duo as significant as Woodward and Bernstein, but in a very different way. When they worked for the Philadelphia Inquirer, they embodied the shoeleather investigative reporting that newspapers once nurtured. My colleague Robert Rosenthal, who was their mentee and friend at the Inquirer, has some moving (and funny!) recollections of the duo here.

But I wanted to zoom out a little, because the kind of reporting Barlett and Steele did is special, valuable, and endangered, and also because of the thing that surprised me in that obit: its last line. “Donations in his name may be made to the Center for Investigative Reporting, Box 584, San Francisco, Calif. 94104.” That’s us! The Center for Investigative Reporting is Mother Jones’ parent organization, and we are a bit of a Noah’s Ark for this kind of endangered journalism.

I was floored when I saw that line, and here’s why. In 1991, I was just out of journalism school, in the middle of a recession and the run-up to a presidential campaign, when Barlett and Steele published a series called America: What Went Wrong? It was a deep dive into the rising income inequality that had come to dominate the US economy.

The pair worked on the series (and subsequent book) for many months, and the book opens with a series of thank-yous that feel like a time capsule: “Lela Young, in the public reading room of the Securities and Exchange Commission in Washington.” But what comes next could have been written yesterday: There are all these pundits on TV talking about how the economy isn’t so bad and everything will be fine, Barlett and Steele note. But then why does it not feel fine to so many people? Here we see a giant graphic that looks exactly like what you would make on your Apple Macintosh in 1991 (you can find it on page ix in the Google Books version). It shows that the top 4 percent of Americans make as much (just in wages, not counting investment income) as the bottom 51 percent.

Perhaps, Barlett and Steele wrote, it’s no wonder that “the stories you read in newspapers and magazines seem disconnected from your personal situation.” Those stories don’t talk about the factories and workplaces being shuttered, about millions of workers going from earning $15 an hour to $7 an hour. “For the first time in this century, members of a generation entering adulthood”—GenX—“will find it impossible to achieve a better lifestyle than their parents. Most will be unable even to match their parents’ middle-class status.”

These Americans, they write, look at the economy from the bottom up. “Those in charge, on the other hand, are on the top looking down. They see things differently. Call it the view from Washington and Wall Street.” Those folks include corporate execs, Republicans—led by Reagan and George H.W. Bush—who pushed through tax giveaways, trade deals, and deregulation, but also Democrats who went along with it.

Imagine the economy like a hockey game, Barlett and Steele continue, “a sport renowned for its physical violence.” Now imagine what the game would look like if you took away the rules and referees. “That, in essence, is what is happening to the American economy. Someone changed the rules. And there is no referee. Which means there is no one looking after the interests of the middle class. They are the forgotten Americans.”

It’s incredibly striking rereading, 33 years later, how accurately Barlett and Steele captured the dynamic that still defines our economy—and our politics. It’s also striking to remember how few mainstream journalists were doing that kind of reporting, and how many fewer do it now.

When I started in journalism, smack in the middle of that early-’90s recession, there were still a lot of investigative reporters in newsrooms, and they did great work, but there was something that defined most of those stories: They were about exposing people breaking the rules. Politicians stealing from the public purse. Construction workers catching naps on the taxpayer’s dime. Reporters exposed illegal acts, not ones that were merely unfair or inequitable. And there was a reason for that: Mainstream newsrooms had positioned themselves as carefully neutral; value judgments had no place in their work. But the mission of investigative reporting, inherently, is about showing the contrast between how things are and how they should be—it’s about exposing wrongs. Every investigative reporter since Ida B. Wells shone a spotlight on lynching has been animated by this. 

Defining “wrong” as “rulebreaking” was a way to avoid making a value judgment—but it meant that a lot of important stories were not told. Stories about systems, especially, such as the growing inequality in the US economy.

That’s what made Barlett and Steele’s reporting so unique, and so powerful. What happened to incomes in America was wrong, it was right there in the book title. Not because it broke any laws (the point was that it was all perfectly legal!) but because it was unfair.

Seeing that journalism could do that—could expose not just lawbreaking, but systemic injustice—was an aha moment for cub reporter me. That’s the kind of work I wanted to be doing, and apparently there were jobs for people to do it.

Little did I know that most of those jobs were about to disappear. Investigative reporting is expensive, and the corporations and hedge fund investors who were buying up America’s newspapers had no intention of paying for it—or, ultimately, for any newsroom jobs. Since Barlett and Steele wrote their series, nearly half of America’s journalism jobs have disappeared (a loss rate faster than coal mining), and most of the rest are on borrowed time. There are very few journalists who can take the time to dig deep on a big issue, especially one as hard to get your arms around as income inequality.

And the idea of journalism as a distant, removed, value-neutral observer, especially in politics, also persists. I don’t need to tell you how much damage the he-said-she-said model has done to campaign coverage. Even now, in the third election of the Trump era, we see media (not all media, all the time—but it happens far too often) laundering extremist disinformation into normal-sounding campaign stories. No wonder that a man who embodies the self-enrichment and rapacious profit-taking that Barlett and Steele skewered in America: What Went Wrong? is getting away with styling himself as a champion of the forgotten Americans.

But Don Barlett wouldn’t want us to stop there, at the doom and gloom. That’s why his obituary ends on that incredible honor of asking readers to support our work here at Mother Jones, Reveal, and the Center for Investigative Reporting. Our newsroom has not been taken over by hedge funders and it never will be. Our budget comes from you, the people who rely on our journalism to tell it like it is. And because we are accountable to you and you alone, we can do the kind of reporting that Don Barlett and Jim Steele did, and do it with the same commitment: exposing what is truly wrong, even if it’s completely legal.

Thank you, Don Barlett. We’ll do you proud.