American Muckraker: Rethinking Journalism for the 21st Century

Book Preface

SUFFERING
The quality of a revolutionary is inversely proportional to the system he fights against –The more oppressive and cruel the system, the more heroic and self-sacrificing is the rebel; in other words, the better and more indulgent the system, the more flippant the revolutionary.1
-Leopold Tyrmand, Polish Anti-Communist, Tyrmand’s Law2

There are two questions the American muckraker is asked repeatedly. Number one: Do you fear for your life? Number two: What can I do? The first question calls upon a library of material written by past muckrakers, broadcasters, lawyers, judges, and academics who risked their lives and careers to expose corruption and maleficence in society’s institutions. Professional truth-seekers do not fear for their life when they are called to this higher purpose, for their life is the vehicle in which defenders of press freedom conduct their crusade in our brave new world of video journalism. When people ask, “What can I do?” what they’re really asking—what they’re truly seeking—is what Viktor Frankl describes as “the striving and struggling of some goal worthy” of themselves.3 During times of universal deceit, a good place to start is telling the truth. Doing this, as George Orwell reportedly said, is, in itself, a “revolutionary act.”4 The muckraker’s revolution is not one of reform or radicalism, but a return to truth, for there is only one true reality.
THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS VS. THE PURSUIT OF MEANING
Rebellion against the system will inevitably cause the muckraker a fair share of pain, political persecution, even prosecution, so piercing, so excruciating, that his continuation down this path risks crossing the line into masochism. He will enter into what Empedocles described as a “region of adversity” fraught with “suffering and toil,” enduring “failures of insight and character” along the way.5
Outside observers feel a combination of wonder and fascination with the muckraker’s art. This creates a curiosity that the muckraker has a hard time understanding. We all know the tale of Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, who said that his former friends and colleagues “regarded him with neither admiration nor censure, but with wonder, as though he were a space-walking astronaut who had cut his lifeline to the mother ship.”6
The muckraker finds himself identifying with Sisyphus, the sufferer of Greek lore consigned to push a rock up a hill for eternity only to see it roll back down every time. Despite his manifest successes, even legendary muckraker Upton Sinclair felt his task more than a little Sisyphean. “You are listening,” he wrote in The Brass Check, “to a man who for fourteen years has been in a battle, and has seen his cause suffering daily wounds from a cruel and treacherous foe.”7
Over time, the muckraker finds himself increasingly alienated from those who marvel at his mission. He wonders how these good people cannot themselves be doing what he is doing. When thanked, the muckraker wonders what he is being thanked for. His job is not over. It is never over. He has barely scratched the surface.
Training and experience have coached him, wrote Rudyard Kipling, to “meet with triumph and disaster…just the same.”8 It culminates with wisdom described by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn as, “Do not rejoice when you have found, do not weep when you have lost,” in his book, The Gulag Archipelago.9 The muckraker knows the fragility of his success because of what he has endured, what he imagines he will endure, and the price he will have to pay for his endurance.
David Daleiden, whose exposé of the baby parts trafficking racket that almost brought down Planned Parenthood, glimpsed into that future. Daleiden vividly recalls taking out the trash “on an idyllic southern California spring day” when the unthinkable happened:

As I rounded the corner, the door of a large, white, windowless van swung open, and a tall, uniformed officer stepped out and blocked my path. “Are you David Daleiden?” he asked. “Yes,” I said nervously as I started to freeze from confusion and surprise.

“We have a search warrant for your apartment from the California Department of Justice,” he said as he shoved papers at me. No less than 11 armed CA DOJ agents, accompanied by K-9 dogs, filed out of the van and sprung out of surrounding police cars. Only half of them fit in my apartment to search it, the rest waited outside with their dogs and assault rifles. The leader of the agents tried to prevent me from calling my lawyer and threatened to seize my phone while I was talking to legal counsel. They overturned my entire apartment, looking behind statues and icons of the Virgin Mary for “evidence.” They thumbed through invoice printouts for fetal body parts from StemExpress, Advanced Bioscience Resources, and the admitted criminal DaVinci companies but left those behind, instead seizing all my hard drives and equipment with the original undercover footage and my laptops going back to high school. I felt powerless, like I was drowning, and it felt like the search lasted forever.10

Daleiden was targeted because of the institution he investigated and the truth he uncovered. His success was his undoing. So was Andy Ngo’s. Working with just a phone and a GoPro camera, the young citizen journalist was doing America’s best reporting on the mounting Antifa terror in Portland, Oregon. In June 2019, Antifa decided they had had enough:

Suddenly, clenched fists repeatedly struck my face and head from all directions. My right knee buckled from the impact. The masked attackers wore tactical gloves – gloves hardened with fiberglass on the knuckles. It’s likely some of them used brass knuckles as well. I put my arms up to surrender, but this only signaled to them to beat me more ferociously. Someone then snatched my camera – my evidence…The mob roared in laughter as I stumbled away.11

As was true with Daleiden, the mainstream media either ignored Ngo’s plight or quietly cheered on his attackers. As to the authorities, writes Ngo, “At no point did police intervene to help.”12
Having observed the fate of truth-tellers like Ngo and Daleiden, the American muckraker has nightmare visions of text exchanges laid bare, freedom of association rights stripped away, donor names illegally leaked and published, police turning a blind eye, and federal agents pounding at his door. The muckraker watches with disgust as the governor of New York defends himself during a 2021 press conference, proclaiming, “I’m not going to argue this issue in the press” when it comes to allegations of his own professional misconduct.13 The muckraker knows full well that the “press” was where that governor of New York went when motivated to defame an ideological opponent, evidenced when a letter written by his own attorney general to this muckraker, somehow arrived at the Daily News, before this muckraker received it. The front-page headline screamed, GOTCHA.14 Yet they said they did not try cases in the press.
This muckraker had broken no laws in New Orleans, yet was stripped of his freedoms, incarcerated, broken, and made an example. His SD chip with the footage that would have set him free was destroyed by a federal magistrate judge, and the powers that be escaped all liability precisely because this fact of evidence destruction was not mentioned in the press. In shackles, this muckraker gave up his Miranda rights and spoke to the FBI, and even the muckraker’s allies would ask, “Why would you do such a thing?”15 In shackles, you’d be surprised at what you’d do.
You are under arrest… the verist simpleton amongst us, drawing on all life’s experience, can gasp out only: “Me? What for?” … in your desperation the fake circus moon will blink at you: “It’s a mistake! They’ll set things right!”
Meanwhile, Rob Sawicki, the press secretary for the senator you were investigating, was telling the press that the one imprisoned muckraker “should save his feeble explanation for the FBI and judge.”16 But the federal prosecutors were not saving their explanations. These prosecutors were simultaneously and anonymously blogging about them in the mainstream media. “Sure they should be punished. Throw the book at them,”17 wrote one prosecutor under a pseudonym in the comments section of The New Orleans Times-Picayune. The prosecutors’ violations of federal ethics laws were so egregious, they would one day be used as a “what not to do” example in the curricula prepared for US attorneys. Yet somehow, they also had the gall to say we don’t try cases in the press.
This muckraker knew what was happening at the time but was never sure that the rest of the world knew themselves. It would take five years and surface as a veritable footnote.18 In truth, the prosecutors had total influence over the press, from the op-ed columns of the New York Times to this muckraker’s Wikipedia page—one so repugnant it evokes audible gasps from anyone who has witnessed his muckraking up close.19
Yes, the world is round, but the lies about me swirl endlessly in a vortex of propaganda and circularly sourced citations on crowdsourced aggregated encyclopedias, with algorithms regurgitating what Chomsky refers to as the “authorized knowers” in society.20 At the core of this vortex are the tech platforms that freely circulate falsehoods while banning the truthful videos of the muckraker. So disorienting is the result that the unknowing citizen sees the American muckraker as an agent of disinformation. Whereas in the Soviet Union, people knew Pravda was a lie, these days there is still a substantial portion of the American people who truly believe what they read in the chyrons on CNN while waiting for their flight’s departure. For the muckraker, scorn and defamation follow, and these are, ironically, directly proportional to the veracity of the reporter’s work. This unending drumbeat of defamation often leads to the surrender of supposed allies who once fought alongside the muckraker in the battle for truth. Neil Gorsuch noted in a recent criticism of New York Times v. Sullivan that the published falsehoods are on a scale so great, “it has come to leave far more [Americans defamed] without redress than anyone could have predicted.”21