{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.02261123267687819, 'fraction_numerical': 0.010211524434719184, 'mean_word_length': 5.368421052631579, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Book Review: Watergate’s Legacy and the Press: The Investigative Impulse by Jon Marshall and Beyond the Killing Fields: War Writings by Sydney Schanberg

Synthesis Essay: Journalism's Crusading 1970sWatergate's Legacy and the Press: The Investigative Impulse. Jon Marshall. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2011. 336 pp. $24.95 pbk.Beyond the Killing Fields: War Writings. Sydney Schanberg. Washington, DC: Potomac Books, 2010. 242 pp. $27.50 hbk.In the gripping final scene of All the President's Men, the Hollywood version of Watergate, the two young reporters who broke the story are told that nothing is riding on their investigation except for "the First Amendment to the Constitution, freedom of the press and maybe the future of the country." Journalism in the 1970s remains a perfect teaching moment for brave, dogged reporting that helped shape America's direction.Both of these books forcefully document its history-one by surveying the origins and possible future of the kind of investigative journalism of which the Washington Post's Watergate stories were a paragon and the other by putting together a compilation of writings from one of the hardest-hitting war correspondents of the era.Jon Marshall's history of investigative journalism is another gem in the growing Visions of the American Press series by the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern, and it is an eminently readable option for a textbook in undergraduate or graduate classes about the history of American journalism. Famed Vietnam correspondent Sydney Schanberg's collection, centered on his 1970s articles from South Asia, makes for a page-turning read that anyone interested in war and media would find hard to put down. Read together today, when the media landscape seems dominated by all the non-public-affairs news that's fit to post, these two volumes offer a powerful snapshot of what journalism in the public interest can accomplish.One of the main strengths of Marshall's book is that it traces the history of "the investigative impulse" from colonial news sheets to ProPublica, weaving in relevant aspects of changing journalism practices, structures, and sociopolitical pressures across more than three centuries. Marshall's central argument is a sad paradox- Watergate might have been both the apex and the undoing of the kind of reporting that hinges on shining a spotlight on disturbing information that someone has tried very hard to keep hidden. And it is precisely that kind of reporting that has buttressed the role of a free press in a democracy.Marshall, a former reporter and columnist who now teaches news writing at Northwestern University, starts his chronological narrative in the 1600s, when American protojournalists were busy ferreting out information that colonial administrators wanted the public to ignore. As the concept of original reporting and the interview developed in the first half of the nineteenth century, penny press journalists pursued cover-ups in everything from the milk industry to brothels.Pulling together threads from a rich literature in investigative journalism, Marshall shows how, at the turn of the twentieth century, national magazines took up investigating with a vengeance, earning the nickname of muckrakers while spurring government reforms of corporate giants such as those in the oil and meatpacking industries. The world wars ushered in major press restrictions and increasingly sophisticated public relations operations, and the journalism establishment put controversial digging on hold under the veneer of expert objectivity.Outside the mainstream, however, the tradition continued. The Investigative Impulse helpfully reminds readers that advances in journalism history were not carried only by heavyweights like the Washington Post but also by small underground publications, ethnic presses like the African American newspapers, and countercultural outlets that never benefited from large budgets or institutional prestige.While the book focuses on print, Marshall does not neglect other media, such as television in the 1950s, where Edward R. …