Shaking the Foundations: 200 Years of Investigative Journalism in America

by Bruce Shapiro

Book Overview

Collects two hundred years of muckraking exposTs in the field of investigative journalism, citing the works of such writers as Henry Adams, Ralph Nader, Lincoln Steffens, John Steinbeck, Rachel... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1560254335
• ISBN13: 9781560254331
• Release Date: July 2003
• Publisher: Nation Books
• Length: 544 Pages
• Weight: 1.65 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.4" x 6.1" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

Shaking the Foundations is a Fascinating Read

When school children learn all about Presidents' Day and the Revolutionary War in primary school they hear about the important men who invented America and its founding documents. What they never learn about in primary school, or even in high school, is how writers, reporters and the printing press invented America through all variety of newspapers, pamphlets and print media that detailed the workings of the British government and fledgling governments in the Colonies. We have all been inducted into the belief, even the pseudo-religion, that it was great men with great ideas who birthed this nation. But the founding fathers' primary means of communication was not public speaking. It was, in fact, the written word that gave birth to America just as surely as the Revolutionary War did. It is in this spirit that journalist Bruce Shapiro has compiled a text of important and sometimes famous examples of investigative reporting in America. The first story from 1798 was written by that old ne'er do well, newspaper publisher Benjamin Franklin. The excerpts Shapiro has included in this compilation are heartbreaking, maddening, educational, revelatory, inspiring and enlightening. He includes a short bio of the reporters and background leading up to each article to give each a sense of time and place. He also tells a bit about each reporter's life to lend an air of humanity to the journalist who sometimes risked his or her life to expose the bitter truth. Some famous stories from this century are included. The Nixon era exposés penned by Woodward, Bernstein, and Jack Anderson are here. The first story of the My Lai Massacre is here as is the first story from the New York Times describing the Pentagon Papers. Today's readers who have lost half of their retirement funds or their homes will be infuriated to read a story written by Drew Pearson in 1931 called "The Man Who Stayed Too Long." It is a detailed, brutal description of what happens when a greedy millionaire, Andrew Mellon (of Carnegie-Mellon fame), gets a job working for the president and how the policies he advised helped lead to the Great Depression. Mellon manipulates the wheels of government to make himself and his friends richer while his fellow Americans stand in line for soup for ten years. It is a story that illustrates the cyclical insanity of Wall Street, for we are living through duplicate circumstances today. One theme that runs through the book with frustrating regularity is that the powerful cannot be trusted. You can read Nellie Bly's 1887 account of what America did with its mentally ill in that century. In a story from 1954 Stetson Kennedy goes undercover as a Klansman and witnesses the torture and murder of a Black cab driver, killed for picking up a White woman as a fare. The excerpt from "No Birds Sing" by Rachel Carson will shock readers who have grown up believing that large corporations care about the environment. It details how the pesticide DDT nearly annihilated th