Investigated Reporting: Muckrakers, Regulators, and the Struggle over Television Documentary

Introduction

introduction Classical liberal theorists of the media’s role in democracy, from John Locke to Thomas Paine, saw journalism’s primary mission as serving as a watchdog on government, by checking abuses of power, exposing corruption , and giving citizens the information they need to manage public affairs. The inheritors of this vision often hold up investigative reporting as the best example of the media’s ability to maintain government’s accountability to the public. In this view, investigative journalism is also the main reason to free the media from regulation, which inevitably threatens to mute journalistic criticism of government.1 This book examines the spread of investigative reporting on American television in the 1960s and early 1970s and the government backlash it attracted. At this time, officials turned the tables on journalists by investigating the fairness and accuracy of muckraking reports more often and more extensively than at any time in television’s history. I find that the roles of journalists and officials were more complicated, and interesting, than liberal theory leads us to expect. Investigative reports were largely shaped by official forces rather than simply acting as a check on government, and regulation in many ways served the cause of investigative journalism rather than hampering it. The very existence of investigative reporting on television from 1960 onward owed a debt to government regulators. Television muckraking appeared stillborn at the end of the 1950s when CBS canceled Edward R. Murrow and Fred Friendly’s See฀It฀Now. The program’s extensively researched and critical coverage of contemporary issues, especially its trenchant reports on Senator Joseph McCarthy, offered the first experiments in investigative journalism on the small screen.2 They were the only such efforts in the 1950s, when fifteenminute network evening news programs offered little time for more than “hopscotching the world for headlines,” as NBC news anchor John Cameron Swayze promised viewers each night. As for documentaries, they were domi00 .intro.1-14.Raph.indd฀฀฀1 6/23/05฀฀฀8:44:00฀AM 2 introduction nated by historical retrospectives on the victories of World War II—CBS’s Air฀ Power and NBC’s Victory฀at฀Sea. Both series featured uncritical compilations of archival film, much of it shot by the American military. However, muckraking reemerged in the new, prime-time documentary series each network developed in the early 1960s, largely in response to regulatory pressure. Many observers attributed the growth of documentaries to the industry’s need to appease regulators in the wake of the quiz-show scandals, when producers were found to be rigging the outcomes of popular game shows.3 Some have argued that pressure from Federal Communications Commission (FCC) chairman Newton Minow was the driving force behind the rise of documentary at the time.4 Others claim that the networks also hoped to stave off antitrust investigations by pleasing congressional overseers.5 Michael Curtin, who has treated the question most comprehensively, shows how the documentary’s rise also expressed a broad elite consensus over revitalizing television, democracy, and America’s role in the world.6 Network executives and Kennedy administration figures hoped that documentaries would teach isolationist Americans about the dangers of communism, the virtues of America’s leadership in the world, and the need for an activist New Frontier foreign policy. Looking abroad, the networks and the United States Information Agency aimed to use documentary to extend American economic and cultural influence, winning the hearts, minds, and eyeballs of the world’s citizens. Thus network executives also saw the format as having economic potential, both for stifling government investigations of television’s commercialism and for putting the networks’ best face forward at a time when they began to expand into international video markets. The FCC and television’s liberal critics liked the public-service connotations of documentary, hoping that the genre would lift the medium’s cultural standards and offer a fair payback for its financial success . For them, the documentary would help provide for more enlightened public participation in politics, giving citizens greater analysis of the pressing social issues of the day. Television journalists, for their part, were attracted to the longer format because it offered a chance to raise their prestige to the level of print journalists, conferring upon them the status of expert mediators between the political realm and citizens. By the late 1960s, this “documentary coalition” had shattered, and the genre became the most troubled of television news offerings. As documentarians began to engage in investigative...