VIRTUAL TALK: “Citizen Reporters” with Stephanie Gorton

CITIZEN REPORTERS: S.S. McClure, Ida Tarbell, and the Magazine That Rewrote America

He was an Irish immigrant, who, despite bouts of mania, overthrew his impoverished upbringing and bent the New York media world to his will. She was his steadying hand, a notoriously fearless journalist who defied the gender expectations of her time.  Meet S.S. McClure and Ida Tarbell. Together, with their reporters Ray Stannard Baker and Lincoln Steffens, they created one of the most influential magazines in American history: McClure’s. It drew over 400,000 readers and published the groundbreaking stories that defined the Gilded Age, including the investigation of Standard Oil that toppled the Rockefeller monopoly. This scrappy little group reported on labor unrest and lynching, published exposes of municipal corruption, and brought readers face to face with a nation mired in dysfunction.  Naturally, this made some people mad. Including at least one president who called them “muckrakers” and “forces of evil.” From its meteoric rise to its spectacularly swift and dramatic combustion, this powerhouse magazine cemented investigative journalism’s crucial role in democracy and gave America a new voice.  It also introduced Americans to the voices of Willa Cather, Arthur Conan Doyle, Robert Louis Stevenson, Joseph Conrad, and many others along the way.

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