[This coming weekend we’ll celebrate the 160th birthday of one of my favorite Americans, Ida B. Wells. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of fellow investigative journalists, leading up to a special tribute to the inimitable Wells!]
On a
fictional character who helps us recognize one of our most vital current journalistic
institutions.
I’ve
written quite
a bit about Treme in this space
(and rightfully so, as it just might be my favorite TV show and at least is
very high on the list), but interestingly have only mentioned one of my
favorite characters from that show, Chris Coy’s reporter
L.P. Everett, in this
post on Coy’s character on a different David Simon show, The Deuce. Partly that’s because Treme is full to bursting with great characters,
played by equally great
actors, and I could easily write a post about each and every one of them. And
partly it’s because of a strength of Coy’s performance—he effortlessly and
thoroughly blends into the role of this seemingly unobtrusive but dogged and
determined investigative journalist, making his scenes and plotlines far more
about the people being interviewed, the clues being tracked down, the hard-won revelations
being discovered. It’s one of the better representations of a fictional
journalist I’ve seen on either the small or the big screen, and one I’d point
to if I wanted to illustrate to an audience what investigative journalism is
and should be.
In
creating such a character, Simon
and Eric Overmyer were also paying tribute to a real such investigative
reporter, A.C. Thompson.
Thompson was sent to New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina by ProPublica, for whom he has worked
for many years as both an investigative journalist and a staff reporter. His
extensive investigations and reporting on the shootings of civilians by New
Orleans police, among other related topics, won him the 2013
Elijah Parish Lovejoy Award for investigative journalism. In the speech
he delivered upon receiving that award, Thompson talks particularly
movingly and powerfully about a story of official
corruption and brutality in Pincohet’s Chile that he remembered from when
he was young, and that had at least partly been his inspiration for moving into
a career in journalism. He ends by linking the main story he investigated in
New Orleans, that of the police murder of Henry Glover and its corrupt
cover-up, to that Chilean story, and notes, “I was sickened by how similar they
seemed. That’s what I have to share with you.”
That’s a
profoundly sobering thought, and one that rings even truer in 2022 America than
it did in 2013 when Thompson delivered his speech. But it’s also perhaps the
best possible argument for why we need investigative journalists, in 21st
century America as in every nation and era. And I don’t know of any
journalistic organization or institution that has done and is doing thoughtful
and vital 21st century American investigative journalism better than
ProPublica.
I don’t want to suggest that it’d be impossible for our more traditional print
or TV media to produce such journalism, and they certainly have at times (I
almost dedicated a post in this series to Woodward
and Bernstein, for example). But it’s worth noting that one thing which
links all the folks about whom I’ve written in this series is that they took
significant risks to pursue their investigations and the truth, and it seems to
me that risk-taking is a trait often found more in the realm of independent
media and voices. And in any case, there’s nobody around taking more risks, and
doing more vital work, these days than the folks at ProPublica.
Tribute
post this weekend,
Ben
PS. What do
you think? Other investigative journalists you’d highlight?
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